The major advantage of using high density SNPs versus microsatellites is the increased information content (IC). IC was calculated using MERLIN to compare the microsatellites and the SNPs in order to investigate factors contributing to the differences between the two scans. The microsatellites were spaced an average of 13 cM apart, whereas the SNPs were spaced an average of 0.35 cM apart. To assess the effect of the reduced IC on the SNP scan, a 3,360-SNP map with an average spacing of 1.0 cM was randomly extracted from the full set of SNPs as a subset for a separate scan.
