Map Distance Measurement

The first experiment gave us 3.5 map units and the latter gave 2 map units.

Why do our two experiments give us two different map unit distances? In both cases, we can see that the parental gene combinations have a strong tendency to stay together. Because the experiments were done with different population sizes, with different plants, and the difference in our map unit estimates is small, the difference could be attributed to chance. The environment may also influence the rate of crossing over to some degree. For practical purposes this gene mapping (or linkage map) information is reliable enough to tell us that these two genes reside close to each other on the same chromosome. Once we have information on distances between other genes, we can improve our map.