PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Baker, Zachary
AU  - Schumer, Molly
AU  - Haba, Yuki
AU  - Bashkirova, Lisa
AU  - Holland, Chris
AU  - Rosenthal, Gil G
AU  - Przeworski, Molly
TI  - Repeated losses of PRDM9-directed recombination despite the conservation of PRDM9 across vertebrates
AID  - 10.1101/093096
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 093096
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/12/093096.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/12/093096.full
AB  - Studies of highly diverged species have revealed two mechanisms by which meiotic recombination is directed to the genome - through PRDM9 binding or by targeting promoter-like features - that lead to dramatically different evolutionary dynamics of hotspots. Here, we identify PRDM9 orthologs from genome and transcriptome data in 225 species. We find the complete PRDM9 ortholog across distantly related vertebrates but, despite this broad conservation, infer a minimum of six partial and three complete losses. Strikingly, taxa carrying the complete ortholog of PRDM9 are precisely those with rapid evolution of its predicted binding affinity, suggesting that all domains are necessary for directing recombination. Indeed, as we show, swordtail fish carrying only a partial but conserved ortholog share recombination properties with PRDM9 knock-outs.