PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Angelika Heissl
AU  - Andrea J Betancourt
AU  - Philipp Hermann
AU  - Gundula Povysil
AU  - Barbara Arbeithuber
AU  - Andreas Futschik
AU  - Thomas Ebner
AU  - Irene Tiemann-Boege
TI  - The impact of poly-A microsatellite heterologies in meiotic recombination
AID  - 10.26508/lsa.201900364
DP  - 2019 Apr 01
TA  - Life Science Alliance
PG  - e201900364
VI  - 2
IP  - 2
4099  - https://www.life-science-alliance.org/content/2/2/e201900364.short
4100  - https://www.life-science-alliance.org/content/2/2/e201900364.full
SO  - Life Sci. Alliance2019 Apr 01; 2
AB  - Meiotic recombination has strong, but poorly understood effects on short tandem repeat (STR) instability. Here, we screened thousands of single recombinant products with sperm typing to characterize the role of polymorphic poly-A repeats at a human recombination hotspot in terms of hotspot activity and STR evolution. We show that the length asymmetry between heterozygous poly-A’s strongly influences the recombination outcome: a heterology of 10 A’s (9A/19A) reduces the number of crossovers and elevates the frequency of non-crossovers, complex recombination products, and long conversion tracts. Moreover, the length of the heterology also influences the STR transmission during meiotic repair with a strong and significant insertion bias for the short heterology (6A/7A) and a deletion bias for the long heterology (9A/19A). In spite of this opposing insertion-/deletion-biased gene conversion, we find that poly-A’s are enriched at human recombination hotspots that could have important consequences in hotspot activation.