Head to tail organization of the human COL6A1 and COL6A2 genes by fiber-FISH.

Two type VI collagen genes, COL6A1 and COL6A2, both map to 21q22.3, but the order, distance, and organization of these two genes relative to one another were not known. Recently developed high-resolution fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques have great potential to facilitate the construction of fine-resolution maps of telomeric regions where gene density is high. Here we have determined the distance separating the COL6A1 and COL6A2 genes (150 kb), the size of the COL6A1 gene (29 kb); and the 5'-3' orientation of these genes (5' COL6A1 3'-5' COL6A2 3') using fiber-FISH.