What is “information content” and why is it important for a linkage study?
Information content is a measure of how informative a marker or map of markers is in a collection of pedigrees in order to extract the maximum amount of inheritance information for a linkage analysis. Information content is a function of marker heterozygosity and the number of meioses in the genetic study. For multi-point linkage analysis, information content is also a function of marker density and spacing. It is important to have high information content throughout the genome for genome-wide searches for disease susceptibility loci or other traits so that regions of no linkage can be excluded, regions of significant linkage can be detected, and the linkage interval can be accurately defined.
