RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Stable recombination hotspots in birds
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 023101
DO 10.1101/023101
A1 Singhal, Sonal
A1 Leffler, Ellen M.
A1 Sannareddy, Keerthi
A1 Turner, Isaac
A1 Venn, Oliver
A1 Hooper, Daniel M.
A1 Strand, Alva I.
A1 Li, Qiye
A1 Raney, Brian
A1 Balakrishnan, Christopher N.
A1 Griffith, Simon C.
A1 McVean, Gil
A1 Przeworski, Molly
YR 2015
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/23/023101.abstract
AB Although the DNA-binding protein PRDM9 plays a critical role in the specification of meiotic recombination hotspots in mice and apes, it appears to be absent from many vertebrate species, including birds. To learn about the determinants of fine-scale recombination rates and their evolution in natural populations lacking PRDM9, we inferred fine-scale recombination maps from population resequencing data for two bird species, the zebra finch Taeniopygia guttata, and the long-tailed finch, Poephila acuticauda, whose divergence is on par with that between human and chimpanzee. We find that both bird species have hotspots, and these are enriched near CpG islands and transcription start sites. In sharp contrast to what is seen in mice and apes, the hotspots are largely shared between the two species, with indirect evidence of conservation extending across bird species tens of millions of years diverged. These observations link the evolution of hotspots to their genetic architecture, suggesting that in the absence of PRDM9 binding specificity, accessibility of the genome to the cellular recombination machinery, particularly around functional genomic elements, both enables increased recombination and constrains its evolution.