Constructing consensus genetic maps in comparative analysis

The construction of consensus genetic maps is a very challenging problem in computational biology. Many computational approaches have been proposed on the basis of only the marker order relations provided by a given set of individual genetic maps. In this article, we propose a comparative approach to constructing consensus genetic maps for a genome, which further takes into account the order relations from a closely related genome when resolving ordering conflicts among individual genetic maps. It aims to retain as many order relations as possible from individual genetic maps while achieving the minimum rearrangement distance to the reference genome. We implement the proposed approach as an integer linear program and test it on both simulated and real biological datasets. The experimental results show that it is capable of constructing more accurate consensus genetic maps than the most recent approach called MergeMap.