MOLECULAR KARYOTYPES - SEPARATING CHROMOSOMES ON GELS

Abstract

For many years, there has been a gap in our capacity to study the structure and organization of chromosomal DNA molecules. The very small genomes of some viruses and bacteriophages (≤ 50,000 bp or 50 kb) are amenable to analysis by conventional gel electrophoresis, while the extremely large DNA molecules (> 100,000 kb) comprising the chromosomes of higher eukaryotes have been analysed under the light microscope, using a range of banding and in situ hybridization techniques. However, intact DNA molecules with sizes between these two extremes have been largely inaccessible experimentally. This gap has recently been bridged with the development of two‐dimensional electrophoretic procedures that..