ABSTRACT
Motivation	There are many genes with inconsistency between their cytogenetic annotations and sequence map positions in current databases. However, not all inconsistencies are the same. Some of them may be problematic which should be corrected in the future; while others may result from the imprecise nature of chromosomal banding which may be tolerable. It is important to stratify the cyto-genetic position information into different confidence groups with the recognition of the impreciseness of cytogenetic banding.
Results	When plotting their cytogenetic annotations against se-quence map positions on a 2-D plane, the consistent genes tend to have a compact linear distribution; while genes with inconsistent positions are more scattered. The overlapping areas between these 2 groups are defined as the tolerable imprecision-zones by linear regression and distance analysis. The system was implemented using sequence information from NCBI Map Viewer Build 36.3 and cytogenetic annotations from NCBI Entrez Gene. The genes position information is classified into five confidence groups: inconsistent-intolerable, inconsistent-tolerable, consistent-imprecise, consistent-precise and consistent-rough. The percentages of these confidence groups are 1.4%, 7.1%, 54.0%, 35.4% and 2.2%, respectively. Us-ing information from NCBI Map Viewer Build 36.3 and NCBI OMIM, the percentages are 3.6%, 17.0%, 49.0%, 19.0%, and 11.4%, re-spectively. Combining these two results, a confidence table of genes position information was constructed.
Availability	The detailed results are accessible over the Internet at http://centrallab.hosp.ncku.edu.tw/imz
Supplementary Information:	http://centrallab.hosp.ncku.edu.tw/imz/
Contact	Kuo-Ho Yen1: moris@dblab.csie.ncku.edu.tw Chung-Liang Ho2,3,*: clh9@mail.ncku.edu.tw Chiang Lee:1leec@dblab.csie.ncku.edu.tw 1Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, 2Institute of Molecular Medicine, National Cheng Kung University, No.1, Da-Shueh Rd. Tainan, Taiwan 3Department of Pathology of National Cheng Kung University Hospital, No.138, Shengli Rd. Tainan, Taiwan