Second generation L . pennellii introgression lines and the concept of bin mapping Liu, Y - S . and Zamir, D . The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Faculty of Agriculture, P . O . Box 12, Rehovot 76100, Israel . E . mail zamir@agri . huji . ac . il The major challenge for the coming years is to develop approaches for tying together sequence information and biological functions . One framework for associating gene sequences and phenotypes is a genetic linkage map . This note introduces the concept of bin mapping in tomato that provides a rapid method for assigning a map position to DNA sequences .   Bin mapping is based on an introgression line (IL; Eshed and Zamir 1995) population that is composed of L . esculentum   (cv . M82) lines each containing a single RFLP defined introgression from the green fruited species L . pennellii (LA 716) . Each of the ILs is nearly isogenic to the cultivated tomato and together the lines provide complete coverage of the tomato genome . The ILs divide the tomato genome into bins each defined by a unique composition of genome coverage . Through probing of the IL membranes with DNA probes it is possible to associate sequences to specific bins . The high level of polymorphism at the DNA level between the two syntenic species , L . esculentum and L . pennellii , ensures high mapping efficiency and the perpetual nature of the population allows to accumulate mapping information from different research groups into a single database . A unique advantage of the ILs is the phenotypic variation that is unraveled in the different lines for simple Mendelian traits as well as for QTLs associated with fruit yield and quality . In this communication we present a new generation of the IL population that is composed of 75 lines (compared to 50 lines in the previous generation) that partition the tomato genome into 107 mapping bins . The original IL map was based on a BC1 population map that included 375 markers while the new population is presented relative to the F2 RFLP map that includes more than 1500 markers that span 1274 cM (Tanksley et al . 1992) . The orientation of the second generation population relative to the F2 map was achieved through probing of all the lines covering each of the chromosomes with all the markers indicated for this chromosome on the genetic map (Figure 1) . A