New Aspects of Meiotic Recombination in Zea mays

The process of meiotic recombination is under intense research. More and more details about the roles of specific proteins and genome-wide regulatory mechanisms are being revealed.

Understanding meiotic recombination in plants is very important for the ultimate goal of ensuring food security through facilitating breeding new cultivars. Till now, recombination studies have been focused on yeast, mammals and the dicot model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

We aim to find out more about genome-wide patterns of meiotic recombination in maize, including distribution of recombination events and their correlation with histone marks and gene expression. I will present our results of mRNA Illumina sequencing of isolated meiocytes (cells undergoing meiosis) and discuss what can be learned about meiosis and meiotic recombination from this research.