The genomic landscape of meiotic crossovers and gene conversions in Arabidopsis thaliana

Elife. 2013 Dec 17:2:e01426. doi: 10.7554/eLife.01426.

Abstract

Knowledge of the exact distribution of meiotic crossovers (COs) and gene conversions (GCs) is essential for understanding many aspects of population genetics and evolution, from haplotype structure and long-distance genetic linkage to the generation of new allelic variants of genes. To this end, we resequenced the four products of 13 meiotic tetrads along with 10 doubled haploids derived from Arabidopsis thaliana hybrids. GC detection through short reads has previously been confounded by genomic rearrangements. Rigid filtering for misaligned reads allowed GC identification at high accuracy and revealed an ∼80-kb transposition, which undergoes copy-number changes mediated by meiotic recombination. Non-crossover associated GCs were extremely rare most likely due to their short average length of ∼25-50 bp, which is significantly shorter than the length of CO-associated GCs. Overall, recombination preferentially targeted non-methylated nucleosome-free regions at gene promoters, which showed significant enrichment of two sequence motifs. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.01426.001.

Keywords: double strand break repair; gene conversion; meiotic recombination; meiotic tetrads; next generation sequencing.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Arabidopsis / genetics*
  • Crossing Over, Genetic*
  • Gene Conversion*
  • Genome, Plant*
  • Haploidy
  • Meiosis / genetics*

Grants and funding

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.