Background: Infertility is increasingly recognized as a major health problem. Meiotic genes are very important candidates for genes contributing to female and male infertility. Mammalian MutL homologues have dual roles in DNA mismatch repair (MMR) after replication errors and meiotic reciprocal recombination. There are four MutL homologues in eukaryotes that mutations of three of them (Mlh1, Ml...

Background: TEX15 is a novel protein that is required for chromosomal synapsis and meiotic recombination. Human TEX15 is located on chromosome 8(8p12 region) and expressed in testis and ovary, as is its mouse ortholog. Loss of TEX15 function in mice causes early meiotic arrest in males but not in females. Specifically, TEX15 deficient spermatocytes exhibit a failure in chromosomal synapsis. In ...

Meiotic recombination is required for proper homologous chromosome segregation in plants and other eukaryotes. The eukaryotic RAD51 gene family has seven ancient paralogs with important roles in mitotic and meiotic recombination. Mutations in mammalian RAD51 homologs RAD51C and XRCC3 lead to embryonic lethality. In the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, RAD51C and XRCC3 homologs are not essentia...

Meiotic ectopic recombination occurs at similar frequencies among many sites in the yeast genome, suggesting that all loci are similarly accessible to homology searching. In contrast, we found that his3 sequences integrated in the RDN1 (rDNA) locus were unusually poor participants in meiotic recombination with his3 sequences at other sites. We show that the low rate of meiotic ectopic recombina...

Background: During the first meiotic prophase, alignment and synapsis of the homologous chromosomes are mediated by the synaptonemal complex. Incorrect assembly of the synaptonemal complex leads to impaired recombination and cell death, which in humans, causes infertility in males. Testis-expressed gene 12 (TEX12) is a germ cell-specific gene that is located on the chromosome 11 (11q22) in huma...

In the meiotic prophase, programmed DNA double-strand breaks (DSB) are introduced along chromosomes to promote homolog pairing and recombination. Although meiotic DSBs usually occur in nucleosome-depleted, accessible regions of chromatin, their repair by homologous recombination takes place in a nucleosomal environment. Nucleosomes may represent an obstacle for the recombination machinery and t...

The study of homologous recombination has its historical roots in meiosis. In this context, recombination occurs as a programmed event that culminates in the formation of crossovers, which are essential for accurate chromosome segregation and create new combinations of parental alleles. Thus, meiotic recombination underlies both the independent assortment of parental chromosomes and genetic lin...

Meiotic exchange occurs preferentially between homologous chromatids, in contrast to mitotic recombination, which occurs primarily between sister chromatids. To identify functions that direct meiotic recombination events to homologues, we screened for mutants exhibiting an increase in meiotic unequal sister-chromatid recombination (SCR). The msc (meiotic sister-chromatid recombination) mutants ...