Sites of recombination are local determinants of meiotic homolog pairing in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Trans-acting factors involved in the early meiotic recombination pathway play a major role in promoting homolog pairing during meiosis in many plants, fungi, and mammals. Here we address whether or not allelic sites have higher levels of interaction when in cis to meiotic recombination events in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We used Cre / loxP site-specific recombination to genetically measure the magnitude of physical interaction between loxP sites located at allelic positions on homologous chromosomes during meiosis. We observed non-random coincidence of Cre-mediated loxP recombination events and meiotic recombination events when the two occurred at linked positions. Further experiments show that a subset of recombination events destined to become crossovers increase the frequency of nearby Cre-mediated loxP recombination. Our results support a simple physical model of homolog pairing in budding yeast, where recombination at numerous genomic positions generally serves to loosely co-align homologous chromosomes, while crossover-bound recombination intermediates locally stabilize interactions between allelic sites.

Key Words: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, homologous chromosomes, meiosis, pairing, recombination

This article has been cited by other articles:

				J. C. Mell, K. Komachi, O. Hughes, and S. Burgess Cooperative Interactions Between Pairs of Homologous Chromatids During Meiosis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae Genetics, June 1, 2008; 179(2): 1125 - 1127. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Online ISS 1091-6490
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