Relationships between chromosomes - (Jul/29/2010 )

Hi everyone, as a no-biologist I have a very basic question:
How are the chromosomes indexed? Is there any ordering relationship between chromosomes?
In other words, is there any evidence that the linkage between two consecutive human chromosomes,
say 4-th and 5-th, larger than the linkage between non-consecutive chromosomes, say 4-th and 20-th?

From what I have read, chromosomes seem to be ordered by their sizes, but they are independent from
each other from the biological point of view.

I am playing with the ideal to map the whole genome into a high dimensional vector space; and I
am wondering whether each chromosome can be used as, more or less, independent dimension. So that
the whole genome will be mapped to a 23-dimensional geometrical structure.

thanks in advance,

James

The size ordering is just convenience, as far as I know there there is no difference in the relationship between chromosome 1 and chromosome 2 compared to chromosome 1 and chromosome 20.

there are some hints that the chromosome are not free to move. In S.pombe it is known that the centromeres of all three chromosomes of the cell are located together at the periphery of the cell nucleus.

Thus the situation could be quite complex, where different sections one chromosome are associated with different sections of other chromosome