Originally published as Genetics Published Articles Ahead of Print on April 10, 2009.

Genetics, Vol. 182, 459-469, June 2009, Copyright © 2009
doi:10.1534/genetics.109.101253

Novel Nucleotide Sequence Motifs That Produce Hotspots of Meiotic Recombination in Schizosaccharomyces pombe

Walter W. Steiner1, Estelle M. Steiner, Angela R. Girvin and Lauren E. Plewik

Department of Biology, Niagara University, Lewiston, New York 14109

1 Corresponding author: Department of Biology, Box 2032, Niagara University, Lewiston, NY 14109.
E-mail: wsteiner{at}niagara.edu

In many organisms, including yeasts and humans, meiotic recombination is initiated preferentially at a limited number of sites in the genome referred to as recombination hotspots. Predicting precisely the location of most hotspots has remained elusive. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that hotspots can result from multiple different sequence motifs. We devised a method to rapidly screen many short random oligonucleotide sequences for hotspot activity in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe and produced a library of ~500 unique 15- and 30-bp sequences containing hotspots. The frequency of hotspots found suggests that there may be a relatively large number of different sequence motifs that produce hotspots. Within our sequence library, we found many shorter 6- to 10-bp motifs that occurred multiple times, many of which produced hotspots when reconstructed in vivo. On the basis of sequence similarity, we were able to group those hotspots into five different sequence families. At least one of the novel hotspots we found appears to be a target for a transcription factor, as it requires that factor for its hotspot activity. We propose that many hotspots in S. pombe, and perhaps other organisms, result from simple sequence motifs, some of which are identified here.


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Genetics 2009 182: NP. [Full Text]