Identifying Genes - Polymorphic Markers

Professor Jonathan Finch describes one technique for identifying genes in rodents.

The way we go about identifying genes that contribute to quantitative variation in rodents primarily has involved, up to date at least, crosses between inbred strains - that’s to say, animals who are genetically identical - and tracking the segregation of genes using anonymous polymorphic markers. There have been a large number of approaches subsequent to that, but that remains the mainstay of identifying the chromosomal positions of those genes.