Construction of human chromosome 21-specific yeast artificial chromosomes

Chromosome 21-specific yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs) have been constructed by a method that performs all steps in agarose, allowing size selection by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis and the use of nanogram to microgram quantities of DNA. The DNA sources used were hybrid cell line WAV-17, containing chromosome 21 as the only human chromosome and flow-sorted chromosome 21. The transformation efficiency of ligation products was similar to that obtained in aqueous transformations and yielded YACs with sizes ranging from 100 kilobases (kb) to greater than 1 megabase when polyamines were included in the transformation procedure. Twenty-five YACs containing human DNA have been obtained from a mouse-human hybrid, ranging in size from 200 to greater than 1000 kb, with an average size of 410 kb. Ten of these YACs were localized to subregions of chromosome 21 by hybridization of RNA probes (corresponding to the YAC ends recovered in Escherichia coli) to a panel of somatic cell hybrid DNA. Twenty-one human YACs, ranging in size from 100 to 500 kb, with an average size of 150 kb, were obtained from approximately equal to 50 ng of flow-sorted chromosome 21 DNA. Three were localized to subregions of chromosome 21. YACs will aid the construction of a physical map of human chromosome 21 and the study of disorders associated with chromosome 21 such as Alzheimer disease and Down syndrome.