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Letter

Exceptionally high levels of recombination across the honey bee genome

¹Institute of Genetics, Heinrich Heine Universität Duesseldorf, Duesseldorf 40225, Germany; ²Section of Evolutionary Biology, Department of Biology II, University of Munich, Planegg-Martinsried 82152, Germany; ³Department of Entomology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA; ⁴Populations, Génétique et Evolution, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, F91198 Gif-sur-Yvette, France; ⁵Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina 27403, USA; ⁶Department of Biology, University of Oulu 90014, Finland; ⁷Department of Environmental Biology, University of Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada; ⁸School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA

The first draft of the honey bee genome sequence and improved genetic maps are utilized to analyze a genome displaying 10 times higher levels of recombination (19 cM/Mb) than previously analyzed genomes of higher eukaryotes. The exceptionally high recombination rate is distributed genome-wide, but varies by two orders of magnitude. Analysis of chromosome, sequence, and gene parameters with respect to recombination showed that local recombination rate is associated with distance to the telomere, GC content, and the number of simple repeats as described for low-recombining genomes. Recombination rate does not decrease with chromosome size. On average 5.7 recombination events per chromosome pair per meiosis are found in the honey bee genome. This contrasts with a wide range of taxa that have a uniform recombination frequency of about 1.6 per chromosome pair. The excess of recombination activity does not support a mechanistic role of recombination in stabilizing pairs of homologous chromosome during chromosome pairing. Recombination rate is associated with gene size, suggesting that introns are larger in regions of low recombination and may improve the efficacy of selection in these regions. Very few transposons and no retrotransposons are present in the high-recombining genome. We propose evolutionary explanations for the exceptionally high genome-wide recombination rate.

E-mail Martin.Beye{at}uni.duesseldorf.de; fax 49-211-8112279.

[Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org. The sequence data from this study have been submitted to dbGSS under accession nos. 15028937–15029063.]

Article published online before print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.5680406.

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