A Comparison of Multiple Genome-Wide Recombination Maps in Apis mellifera

Abstract

Increasingly, studies demonstrate significant intra-specific variation in genome-wide recombination rates, supporting the notion that local rates of meiotic recombination are evolving. The honey bee, Apis mellifera, exhibits the highest rate of recombination across the genome among multicellular animals. Multiple linkage maps have been constructed and agree on the overall high recombination rate but local rates have not been compared in detail. Here, we compared eight genome-wide recombination maps at different scales to assess how they relate to each other. We found that variation from a 50 to 1,000 kbp scale does not systematically affect the moderate correlations among the recombination maps. Individual chromosomes differed from each other in how much recombination rates were conserved but no apparent relation to chromosome size or average recombination existed. Finally, the overall similarities among maps related more to methodological than to mapping population coalescence. Therefore, recombination maps that were constructed using different methods should be compared with caution and results that are derived from such multiple data sets should prove more robust than analyses of single maps, irrespective of intra-specific variation in recombination rates.