Open AccessReduced meiotic recombination in rhesus macaques and the origin of the human recombination landscape
Author(s) -
Xian Cheng,
Navin Rustagi,
Xiaoming Liu,
Muthuswamy Raveendran,
R. Alan Harris,
Manjunath Gorentla Venkata,
Jeffrey Rogers,
Fuli Yu
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0236285
Subject(s) - rhesus macaque , biology , recombination , genome , macaque , autosome , genetics , homologous recombination , genetic recombination , genome evolution , meiosis , evolutionary biology , human genome , chromosome , gene , paleontology
Characterizing meiotic recombination rates across the genomes of nonhuman primates is important for understanding the genetics of primate populations, performing genetic analyses of phenotypic variation and reconstructing the evolution of human recombination. Rhesus macaques ( Macaca mulatta ) are the most widely used nonhuman primates in biomedical research. We constructed a high-resolution genetic map of the rhesus genome based on whole genome sequence data from Indian-origin rhesus macaques. The genetic markers used were approximately 18 million SNPs, with marker density 6.93 per kb across the autosomes. We report that the genome-wide recombination rate in rhesus macaques is significantly lower than rates observed in apes or humans, while the distribution of recombination across the macaque genome is more uniform. These observations provide new comparative information regarding the evolution of recombination in primates.