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Published online before print
December 29, 2005, 10.1101/gr.4641706 Genome Res. 16:208-214, 2006 ©2006 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; ISSN 1088-9051/06 $5.00
Letter Strong correlation between meiotic crossovers and haplotype structure in a 2.5-Mb region on the long arm of chromosome 211 Department of Molecular Genetics, Microbiology and Immunology, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA 2 Department of Biometrics, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA 3 Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland 21250, USA 4 Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA 5 Department of Biomathematics, University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
Although the haplotype structure of the human genome has been studied in great detail, very little is known about the mechanisms underlying its formation. To investigate the role of meiotic recombination on haplotype block formation, single nucleotide polymorphisms were selected at a high density from a 2.5-Mb region of human chromosome 21. Direct analysis of meiotic recombination by high-throughput multiplex genotyping of 662 single sperm identifies 41 recombinants. The crossovers were nonrandomly distributed within 16 small areas. All, except one, of these crossovers fall in areas where the haplotype structure exhibits breakdown, displaying a strong statistically positive association between crossovers and haplotype block breaks. The data also indicate a particular clustered distribution of recombination hotspots within the region. This finding supports the hypothesis that meiotic recombination makes a primary contribution to haplotype block formation in the human genome.
It is known that in the human population, certain alleles of genetic markers within a short distance are in tight association (linkage disequilibrium or LD) and LD becomes weak or disappears when the markers are located farther apart (Ardlie et al. 2002
There is a strong belief that meiotic recombination plays a primary role in shaping LD and therefore has a direct effect on the haplotype structure found in the human (Daly et al. 2001
By using pooled sperm, a 216-kb segment in the class II region of the MHC was studied in detail to elucidate such a relation (Jeffreys et al. 2001 In-depth study of a large chromosomal region is also necessary for this purpose, but it is especially challenging because haplotype blocks are usually very small, ranging from several hundred bases to several hundred kb, and meaningful information cannot be obtained until a large number of meiotic products are scored with a high marker density. The diploid nature of the human genome and the difficulty in gathering pedigrees large enough to study make this analysis very challenging.
Single sperm typing (Li et al. 1988
Identification of meiotic crossovers by single sperm typing In the present study, a panel of 578 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a 2.5-Mb region on the long arm of chromosome 21 (from 38.01 Mb to 40.51 Mb) with an average intermarker distance of 4323 bp was selected from the public SNP database, dbSNP (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/index.html), maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The markers were incorporated into our high-throughput genotyping system (Wang et al. 2005
In total, 662 single sperm samples, 472 from D-11, 115 from D-12, and 75 from D-8 were genotyped at all 578 marker loci. Forty-one recombinants were identified from the 662 single sperm samples, each containing a single crossover. The crossovers identified represent a 6.19% recombination rate, 1.41 times the male average for chromosome 21, and 2.57 times the genomic average (Kong et al. 2002
Thirty recombinants (6.36%) out of 472 single sperm from donor D-11 were identified. The crossovers were found in 16 regions (X1 to X16) that are defined as being flanked by the nearest informative SNPs. Two additional individuals, D-12 and D-8, were genotyped to determine whether the pattern of crossover events occurring was similar between individuals. Six crossovers were identified among 115 sperm (5.22%) from individual D-12, and five among 75 sperm (6.67%) from individual D-8, as shown in Figure 1A and Table 1. These 11 crossovers fell into eight regions that were either located within or overlapped with (note, different donors have different sets of informative SNPs) regions from D-11 containing one or more crossovers. When informative markers are used at a high density, each crossover will fall in an interval between the nearest informative markers, which is usually smaller than the expected interval size calculated based on the genomic or chromosomal averages, even if the crossovers occur randomly. Therefore, when a small region contains a single crossover, no matter how small this region is, it may not necessarily be a recombination hotspot. However, when more than one crossover is found in such a region, it may indicate a correlation between the occurrence of crossovers and the respective region. Six regionsX2, X3, X8, X10, X12, and X16were found to contain more than one recombinant from D-11. The recombination rates in four of these regions are more than 10 times greater than expected based on the average rate of the 2.5-Mb region. However, such a comparison is very superficial because it does not take the probability of occurrence of these crossovers into consideration. For example, based on the regional average, the probability for one crossover to occur within the 48.5-kb region of X2 is 0.0012. Therefore, the probability of five or more crossovers occurring in this region should be 3.01 x 104 times the expected based on the binomial test. In total, six regions (X2, X3, X12, X16, X17, and X22) were found to have recombination rates significantly different than expected. Region X12, whose rate was 1.65 x 108 times the expected, was the highest (Table 1).
If the crossovers from all three individuals were considered additively, ten regions (X1, X2, X3, X4, X6, X8, X10, X12, X14, and X16) would contain greater than a single crossover. Six other regions contained only one crossover in each. However, these single-crossover regions do not weaken the nonrandomness of crossover distribution because, as shown by Jeffreys et al. (2001
Correlation between regions containing crossovers and haplotype blocks
The correlation between the crossovers and haplotype block is also shown between the locations of the crossovers and haplotype block boundaries. Haplotype information for chromosome 21 is available on the UCSC genome browser (http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgGateway) based on the study by Patil et al. (2001
Between two informative markers there are three possible haplotype structures, which we defined as Types I, II, and III. A Type I region contained at least part of one haplotype block and the area between two haplotype blocks within which no haplotype structure is found. Type II regions were between two haplotype blocks and contained no haplotype structure. Type III regions were defined as areas within a single haplotype block (for graphical representation, see Supplemental Fig. 2). For in-depth analysis of the correlation between crossovers and haplotype blocks, the entire 2.5-Mb region was divided into subregions by the informative markers. Of the 2.5-Mb region, 1.87 Mb (74.7%) were covered by Type I regions, 0.11 Mb (4.4%) by Type II, and 0.52 Mb (20.9%) by Type III regions. Therefore, if the crossovers occurred randomly, the 30 crossovers from donor D-11 should be distributed as 22.41 in Type I, 1.32 in Type II, and 6.27 in Type III regions. In contrast, we observed 25 in Type I, 4 in Type II, and 1 in Type III, which is significantly different from the expected (P = 0.005 by Exact Test and P = 0.006 by Pearson's
Recombination hotspots may be present in clusters
Thirteen areas (A1-A13, Fig. 1B), between haplotype blocks >20 kb and containing small blocks (4 to 24 in each) and spacers, were analyzed in detail. As shown in Table 2, the average block size in these areas ranges from 3.0 to 7.8 kb. The average spacer size ranges from 3.5 to 8.8 kb, comparable with the block size in these areas. Other than these 13 areas, there are also smaller areas that may accommodate recombination, such as X19, which falls into a small area between two large blocks of 33.6 and 43 kb with a smaller block of 18.1 kb in between.
The number of crossovers in each area, A1-A13, was plotted against the number of spacers. As shown in Figure 2, the two parameters display a significant positive correlation (R2 = 0.64), indicating a cumulative effect of the number of spacers on the number of crossovers. The correlation becomes very strong (R2 = 0.94) if A2 is excluded. Assuming that spacers, the region between haplotype blocks lacking any haplotype structure, contain recombination active elements (RAEs), the occurrence of recombination may be affected by two factors: (1) the number of RAEs, and (2) the recombination activity of these RAEs. If the activities of the elements are similar, the number of crossovers should be directly proportional to the number of spacers, which is the situation in all areas except A2. Divergence of the number of crossovers in A2 from the linear function indicates that the elements in this area may be very active or A2 contains much denser RAEs than other regions. More studies would be necessary to learn whether such areas are common in the human genome.
In a recombination study with pooled sperm, Jeffreys et al. (2001
The hypothesis that spacers analyzed in the present study are caused by recombination hotspots is consistent with current models of recombination (for review, see Keeney 2001
In previous studies, the recombination rate at hotspots identified has varied (Jeffreys et al. 2001
Our study provides direct evidence of the role of meiotic recombination on haplotype block formation. A much larger chromosomal region was studied in the present study than in previous analysis of recombination hotspots in sperm samples (Jeffreys et al. 2000
SNP selection A 2.5-Mb region from 38016911 to 40516122 bp of chromosome 21 was selected for analysis. Initially, 545 SNPs were selected with an intermarker distance of 4.65 kb from the NCBI dbSNP build 109. The locations of some selected markers changed during the span of the project with the update of human genome builds. Locations cited are based on NCBI Human Genome Build 34 version 3 and are consistent with mapping performed by sperm typing (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/buildhistory.cgi). An additional 33 SNPs were added later from build 121 within X2, X8, and X12 of D-11. All SNPs in this region were analyzed to determine whether they would fit the constraints of our high-throughput multiplex PCR system (see Wang et al. 2005
Identification of informative individuals
Single sperm preparation
High-throughput multiplex genotyping
Haplotype block analysis
Statistical cluster analysis
The authors thank Dr. David Seifer and his laboratory for providing semen samples and Dr. Natalia Berloff for her useful discussion on data analysis. This work was supported in part by a grant R01 HG002094 from the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health to H.L.
Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.4641706.
6 Corresponding author. [Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org and http://www2.umdnj.edu/lilabweb/Publications.htm.]
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Received September 2, 2005; accepted in revised format October 31, 2005. This article has been cited by other articles:
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