MOTIVATION: A considerable amount of human intervention is currently required to produce high-quality fingerprint-based physical maps for genomic studies. RESULTS: An algorithm has been developed and implemented to automatically order fingerprinted clones within contigs. The resulting software, named CORAL (Clone ORdering ALgorithm), has been tested on maps that have previously been manually edited and on maps derived from in silico simulations. The fingerprint map and DNA sequence of the human genome has provided an additional test to CORAL. Measurements suggest that CORAL performs significantly better than the software currently used by most laboratories to order fingerprinted clones at throughputs far exceeding those that can be achieved manually.