APPROVAL

The biological sciences are becoming increasingly dependent on information science as they accrue large amounts of data that must be organized and analyzed in order to gain some new information or obtain results from the data. One such task is the physical mapping of genomes, which in this case, is creating a map that specifies the order of clones along a particular genome. Many genomes, especially grasses such as barley or wheat, contain retroposons and repetitive elements that make the task of building a physical map of the genome more difficult. The software project described in this thesis takes this into account and will allow these known problem segments of DNA to be filtered out before further calculations are done on the data. The algorithm’s flexibility allows genomes with different degrees of variation to be pieced together with varying stringency levels chosen by the user, allowing more accurate maps to be created, based on the available data. The software will order the clones of large genomes quickly and accurately, displaying a graphical representation of the clones depicting the overlap and order as determined by the algorithm