MITEs in banana and the nightshades. MITEs as Genetic Markers Based on the presence or absence of MITE family Heartbreaker (Hbr) in maize genome, a molecular marker was developed. These Hbr markers have been proved to be stable, uniformly distributed in maize genome. A study by Casa et al. showed that HBr markers could be used along with other molecular markers to study genotype of related maize inbred lines Computational Assistance Software like FINDMITE use sequence entries of some average sized bp to identify MITE families. A MATLAB-based program called detectMITE can detect MITEs on genome wide scale and was tested on rice genome. Others like MUST and MITE-Hunter are also used for similar purposes. To characterize MITE families a toolkit has been developed called MITE Analysis Kit MAK by Yang and Hall. References Genetic mapping Genomics