A High-resolution Map of Non-crossover Events Reveals Impacts of Genetic Diversity on Mammalian Meiotic Recombination

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2019 Aug 31

PMID 31467277

Citations 49

Authors

Ran Li

Emmanuelle Bitoun

Nicolas Altemose

Robert W Davies

Benjamin Davies

Simon R Myers

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

During meiotic recombination, homologue-templated repair of programmed DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) produces relatively few crossovers and many difficult-to-detect non-crossovers. By intercrossing two diverged mouse subspecies over five generations and deep-sequencing 119 offspring, we detect thousands of crossover and non-crossover events genome-wide with unprecedented power and spatial resolution. We find that both crossovers and non-crossovers are strongly depleted at DSB hotspots where the DSB-positioning protein PRDM9 fails to bind to the unbroken homologous chromosome, revealing that PRDM9 also functions to promote homologue-templated repair. Our results show that complex non-crossovers are much rarer in mice than humans, consistent with complex events arising from accumulated non-programmed DNA damage. Unexpectedly, we also find that GC-biased gene conversion is restricted to non-crossover tracts containing only one mismatch. These results demonstrate that local genetic diversity profoundly alters meiotic repair pathway decisions via at least two distinct mechanisms, impacting genome evolution and Prdm9-related hybrid infertility.

Citing Articles

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