The practice of genotyping a member of the CEPH collection of families,
especially when using a microsatellite marker (ie. dinucleotide repeat),
is a good way to standardize the "sizes" of alleles reported by various
groups. My problem is that not everyone is using the same reference CEPH
member to type! For example, Weber et al., Genomics 11, 695 (1991), uses
person 133101 and 133102 whereas Weissenbach et al., Nature 359, 794 (1992)
uses person 134702 (the paper doesn't include the alleles from person
134702 but they are available by anonymous FTP from Genethon).
It would be NICE if everyone was using the same reference DNA as a
standard. Are efforts being made in this direction? If not, what would it
take to get people to use the same reference DNA?
Knowles et al., Am. J. Hum. Genetics, 51: 905 (1992) discussed the
problems of discrepancies between allele sizes reported by different groups.
