High-efficiency yeast artificial chromosome fragmentation vectors.

Chromosome fragmentation vectors (CFVs) are used to create deletion derivatives of large fragments of human DNA cloned as yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs). CFVs target insertion of a telomere sequence into the YAC via homologous recombination with Alu repetitive elements. This event results in the loss of all YAC sequences distal to the site of integration. A new series of CFVs has been developed. These vectors target fragmentation to both Alu and LINE human repetitive DNA elements. Recovery of deletion derivatives is ten- to 20-fold more efficient with the new vectors than with those described previously.