Despite being derived from disparate populations and marker sources, the component maps and the derived IM had consistent representations of the white clover genome for marker order and genetic length.
Furthermore, while these maps were based predominantly on discrete marker sources and MP2 had a greater number of marker loci (49%) and density (39%) relative to MP1, both maps revealed largely similar views of the genome.
Our results show that the proposed markers either taken alone or combined in a signature have a limited diagnostic or prognostic power and that further studies need to be done across an increasing range of potential marker sources.
Despite being derived from disparate populations and distinct marker sources, the component maps (MP1 and MP2), and the subsequent IM, provide a consistent and comprehensive view of the white clover genome in terms of marker order and linkage group size.
Several linkage maps of various sizes, marker sources and completeness are available, however, no integrated map and marker set has explored consistency of linkage analysis among unrelated mapping populations.
Furthermore, the integrated map is a robust composite assessment of the white clover genome, being derived from component linkage maps that reveal very similar data in terms of marker order, genome arrangement and map size; despite being based on dissimilar populations and distinct marker sources.
Although derived from unrelated populations and distinct marker sources, the linkage maps of MP2 (Additional file 3) and MP1 [ 20] revealed a similar view of the white clover genome in terms of shared marker order and linkage group size (Table 2).
They comprised 112 cattle (Bos taurus) markers, 73 sheep (Ovis aries) markers, and 15 other bovidae markers sourced from Prof. Yoshikazu Sugimoto (pers. comm).
The details on SSR marker code, source species and number of SSRs developed are given in the Table 1.
