In this article, we used PCR analysis with arbitrary primers (AP-PCR) to screen for overlapping bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones and assembly of contigs. A rice BAC library with three genome equivalents was used to prepare pooled BAC DNA. Twenty-two arbitrary primers were used to survey the pooled BAC DNAs and individual BAC DNAs. Each primer identified 1-10 loci, and the average was 4.4 loci. There were 1-5 overlapping clones in each locus, and the average was 2.5 clones. A total of 245 BAC clones were identified as overlapping by AP-PCR and the identities were confirmed by DNA-DNA hybridization. The 245 BAC clones were then assembled into 80 contigs and 17 single-clone loci. The results indicated that PCR analysis with arbitrary primers is a powerful tool in screening for overlapping BAC clones with high accuracy and efficiency. The use of AP-PCR analysis should speed up the construction of physical maps of the plant and animal genomes, as well as the rice genome.Intensive efforts are being made to construct high-resolution physical maps of human, animal, and plant genomes through the generation of ordered overlapping DNA fragments. Because of their capacity for housing large fragments of exogenous DNA, yeast artificial chromosomes (YAC) (1) and bacterial artificial chromosomes (BAC) (2) are used to generate contigs of large genomes. Several approaches are used to identify overlapping clones. DNA-DNA hybridization with mapped DNA markers, combined with chromosomal walking, is widely used to identify overlapping YAC clones. A YAC contig map of the human genome has been constructed by using this technique (3). In plants, physical maps of overlapping YAC clones of chromosomes 2 (4) and 4 (5) of Arabidopsis have been constructed by colony hybridization of YAC libraries. With the use of 1,383 DNA markers, the rice physical map of YAC covers about 50% of the rice genome (6). To obtain more complete coverage of the rice genome, a higher-density marker map is being constructed (7). Obviously, the major limitation of this approach to generate a physical map is the requirement of a high-density DNA marker map of the target genomes. Furthermore, repetitive DNA sequences present in eukaryote genomes and chimeric YAC clones create enormous difficulties in chromosome walking (6,8).Another approach to assemble overlapping clones is based on DNA fingerprinting of random clones (9, 10). The restriction fragments of each DNA clone show typical banding patterns when separated in high-resolution gels and͞or probed with DNA probes. Overlapping clones are identified by shared restriction fragments. By use of DNA fingerprinting of cosmid clones, a high-quality physical map of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans genome was constructed (11). Though the DNA fingerprinting approach is effective in mapping a small genome, its application to a large genome such as the human genome can be difficult (3).Sequence tag site (STS) content mapping is used for the identification of YAC clones (12). Early application of the met...