Piotr Ziółkowski Lab: The effect of DNA polymorphisms and natural variation on crossover hotspot activity in Arabidopsis hybrids published in Nature Communications, 4th January 2023
Maja Szymańska-Lejman, Wojciech Dzięgielewski, Julia Dłużewska, Nadia Kbiri, Anna Bieluszewska and Scott Poething led by Piotr Ziółkowski has published their work on the effect of polymorphism on crossover in Nature communications – congratulations! Check out the paper https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35722-3 or at least Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Piotraz1/status/1610290370021134338?s=20 !
In hybrid organisms, genetically divergent homologous chromosomes pair and recombine during meiosis. Maja and colleagues have analyzed this in Arabidopsis and developed the seed-typing method that enables the massively parallel fine-mapping of crossovers by sequencing. They showed that structural variants, observed in one of the generated intervals, do not change crossover frequency unless they are located directly within crossover hotspots. Both natural and Cas9-induced deletions resulted in lower hotspot activity but were not compensated by increases in immediately adjacent hotspots.