On the limitations of automated restriction mapping.

Eight important restriction mapping programs, developed between 1978 and 1993, are analyzed and their performance evaluated. The analyses concentrate on the practical value of the programs to molecular biologists who do restriction mapping on a daily basis, rather than on theoretical efficiency. Although all of the programs could find maps consistent with the data, none were able to discriminate reliably the true map from the other consistent maps, given realistic levels of error. To alleviate this problem, we propose an expert mapping system which utilizes the same inferences and mapping techniques used by expert human mappers to reduce the number of false maps found.