Telomere cloning and mammalian chromosome analysis.

Although eucaryotic chromosomes vary in size over five orders of magnitude and are constituents of diverse genetic systems the fundamental features of their telomeres appear to be almost completely conserved. This can be exploited to enable molecular cloning of human telomeres in yeast and suggests that many of the ideas that will arise from studies of telomeres in the experimentally tractable ciliates and yeasts will hold true of mammalian telomeres. The particular value of cloned mammalian telomeres is that they contribute reagents for mapping mammalian chromosomes and that they provide one set of elements for the construction of artificial mammalian chromosomes.