ABSTRACT
What the clinical cytogeneticist refers to as "banding" is the staining method by which dark and light differential staining is induced along the lengths of the chromosomes. According to the Paris Conference ( 1 97 1 ) (1 ) , a chromosome band is part of a chromosome that can be distinguished from adjacent segments by appearing darker or lighter by one or more techniques . By this definition, chromosomes consist of a continuous series of dark and light bands, with no interbands . Three levels of resolution were standardized, namely, 400, 550, and 850 bands per haploid karyotype. Further descriptions of the universally adopted cytogenetic nomenclature can be found in An International System for Human Cytogenetic Nomenclature ( 1 995) (2) and also in Chapter 3 in this volume.
