Transcript mapping in the mouse using radiation hybrids ======================================================= Paris group: Philip Avner1, 2, Isabelle Poras1, Gabor Gyapay1, Cecile Fizames1, Nuchanard Chiannilkulchai1, William Saurin1, Jean Weissenbach1: 1Genescope-Centre National de Sequencage, 2 rue Gaston Cremieux, 91006 Evry, France, and 2Unite de Genetique Moleculaire Murine, Institut Pasteur, 25 rue du Dr Roux, 75015 Paris, France. Oxford group: Lorraine Eley, Paul Lyons, Nicola Armitage and Roger D. Cox: Wellcome Trust Centre For Human Genetics, Windmill Road, Headington, Oxford OX3 7BN UK. Milano group: Giacomo Manenti: Instituto Nazionale Tumori, Via G. Venezian I, 20133 Milano, Italy. Berlin Group: Michael Wiles, Hans Lehrach: Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, 14195 Berlin, Germany. London group: Rosa Beddington and Sally Dunwoodie, Laboratory of Mamallian Development, National Institute for Medical Research, London, Mill Hill, UK. Cambridge group: Patricia Rodriguez-Tome, Jeremy D. Parsons: European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK. An EU funded consortium co-ordinated through the Paris laboratory is constructing a transcript map of the mouse genome using the radiation hybrid panel T31 constructed by Linda McCarthy (Genome Research 7:1153-1161, 1997) and distributed through Research Genetics. The aim of the consortium is to generate a robust framework map and to map 10,000 ESTs. The ESTs are being obtained both from public databases and from sequence generated from the London laboratory embryo libraries. Pancreatic islet libraries are being generated in Oxford from late embryos over the time course of islet formation, and will be incorporated in a programme of sequencing and EST generation later in the project. Large scale sequencing of ESTs is being carried out in the Berlin laboratory. Cambridge have created an EST clustering, allocation and browsing workbench to assist International collaboration and minimise wasted STS mapping effort. Using public CORBA servers, and Java applets, a user can browse from EST clusters down to traces and sequences or up to the Radiation Hybrid Database (see Parsons and Rodriguez-Tome abstract). The consortium plans to offer a mapping service through the Milano laboratory will be discussed. We will describe the current status of the framework marker maps, of EST generation and mapping, and of the library construction experiments.