Intracisternal A-particle-specific oligonucleotides provide multilocus probes for genetic linkage studies in the mouse.

Oligonucleotide probes representing distinct intracisternal A-particle (IAP) subfamilies were derived from the long terminal repeats (LTRs) of transcriptionally active IAP genes in normal mouse cells. These probes were used to examine the distribution of IAP proviral elements in the genomic DNA of several inbred mouse strains. Each oligonucleotide probe identified multiple polymorphisms between the different strains. The distribution of polymorphic restriction fragments among the CXB set of recombinant inbred (RI) strains demonstrates the feasibility of using these probes for chromosome mapping. These and other subset-specific IAP probes can provide a useful series of multilocus markers for genomic mapping and genetic analysis in the mouse.