Information and the clone mapping of chromosomes

Abstract

A clone map of part or all of a chromosome is the result of organizing order and overlap information concerning collections of DNA fragments called clone libraries. In this paper the expected amount of information (entropy) needed to create such a map is discussed. A number of different formalizations of the notion of a clone map are considered, and exact or approximate expressions or bounds for the associated entropy are calculated for each formalization. Based on these bounds, comparisons are made for four species of the entropies associated with the mapping of their respective cosmid clone libraries. All the entropies have the same first-order term $N \log_2 N$ (when the clone library size $N \to \infty$) as that obtained by Lehrach et al.