Meiotic recombination at the Lmp2 hotspot tolerates minor sequence divergence between homologous chromosomes.

Abstract

Recombination is widely considered to linearly depend on the length of the homologous sequences. An 11% mismatch decreases the rate of phage-plasmid recombination 240-fold. Two single nucleotide mismatches, which reduce the longest uninterrupted stretch of similarity from 232 base pairs (bp) to 134 bp, reduce gene conversion in mouse L cells 20-fold. The efficiency of gene targeting through homologous recombination in mouse embryonic stem cells can be increased by using an isogenic, rather than a non-isogenic, DNA construct. In this study we asked whether a high degree of sequence identity between homologous mouse chromosomes enhances meiotic recombination at a hotspot. Sites of meiotic recombination in the mouse major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II region are not randomly distributed but are almost all clustered within short segments known as recombinational hotspots. The wm7 MHC haplotype, derived from Japanese wild mice Mus musculus molossinus, enhances meiotic recombination at a hotspot near the Lmp2 gene. Heterozygotes between the wm7 haplotype and the b or k haplotypes have yielded a high frequency of recombination (2.1%) in 1.3 kilobase kb segment of this hotspot. 20 refs., 2 figs.