Abstract
Non-crossover gene conversion is a type of meiotic recombination characterized by the non-reciprocal transfer of genetic material between homologous chromosomes. Gene conversions are thought to occur within relatively short tracts of DNA, estimated to be in the order of 100-1,000 bp in humans. However, the number of observable gene conversion tracts per study has so far been limited by the use of pedigree or sperm-typing data to detect gene conversion events. In this study, we propose a statistical method to estimate the mean length of gene conversion tracts in humans. Our method can handle a large number of gene conversion tracts, leading to more precise estimates of the mean tract length. We apply our method to gene conversion tracts detected in whole autosome sequence data from the UK Biobank using clusters of identity-by-descent segments. From this dataset, we estimate the mean gene conversion tract length in humans to be 459 bp (95% CI: [457, 461]). Stratifying detected gene conversion tracts by whether they overlapped with a recombination hotspot, we estimate the mean gene conversion tract length to be 418 bp (95% CI: [416, 420]) and 492 bp (95% CI: [489, 494]) respectively, for tracts that overlap and do not overlap with a recombination hotspot.
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Published Version
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