IUBio

What _is_ a Kosambi centimorgan?

Joe Felsenstein joe at GENETICS.WASHINGTON.EDU
Tue Nov 3 13:20:16 EST 1992


Nigel Walker asked:

> I was just wading through this months Genetics and ran into a term I
> can't figure out.  As the subject line says: What is a Kosambi
> centimorgan?  How does it differ from a plain vanilla centimorgan?  Is
> there a difference? 

I think a Kosambi centimorgan is just a name for an ordinary centimorgan,
when that centimorgan is estimated from recombination fractions, using
the mapping function of Kosambi:

   Kosambi, D. D.  1944. The estimation of map distance from recombination
      values.  Annals of Eugenics  12: 172-175.

There are other mapping functions, and there is no real reason to append the
name of the mapping function to the name "centimorgan" as if what it
calculates is incommensurable with ordinary centimorgans.

-----
Joe Felsenstein, Dept. of Genetics, Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195
 Internet:         joe at genetics.washington.edu     (IP No. 128.95.12.41)
 Bitnet/EARN:      felsenst at uwavm



More information about the Mol-evol mailing list

Send comments to us at biosci-help [At] net.bio.net