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MBE Advance Access published online on July 18, 2008
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msn158
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Letter

Insertion DNA promotes ectopic recombination during meiosis in Arabidopsis

Xiaoqin Sun*,1, Yuanli Zhang*,1, Sihai Yang*, Jian-Qun Chen*, Barbara Hohn{dagger} and Dacheng Tian*

* State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Plant Molecular Institute, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China
{dagger} Friedrich Miescher Institute, CH-4058 Basel, Switzerland

Address for correspondence and reprints: Dacheng Tian, Department of Biology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China. Tel: 86-25-83686406; Fax: 86-25-83592705; E-mail: dtian{at}nju.edu.cn.

Received for publication April 11, 2008. Revision received June 30, 2008. Accepted for publication July 10, 2008.

Nucleotide insertion/deletions are common polymorphisms in living organisms, however, little is known about their genetic behavior during meiosis. Here, the recombination frequency of isogenic strains of transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana, that differ in the presence or absence of an insertion, was compared. We screened over six million seedlings and found that during meiosis, the unpaired DNA insertions paired with ectopic homologues, and demonstrated a 13.8 times higher recombination frequency than that of non-insertion DNA. The direct measurement of recombination events provided the first evidence that a large piece of insertion DNA had a unique genetic behavior during meiosis. This pattern was consistently observed in different lines varying in overlapping sequence, construct orientation, chromosome location and crossing direction. We suggest that higher ectopic recombination is promoted by DNA insertions and this mechanism exists commonly in plant. Therefore, insertion DNA plays a non-trivial role in shaping genetic variation, chromosome instability and genome evolution.

Key Words: insertion/deletion • ectopic recombination • genetic variation • Arabidopsis

1 These authors contributed equally to this work.


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