Recombination Hotspot

Recombination Hotspot

Recombination hotspots are regions in a genome that exhibit elevated rates of recombination, relative to a neutral expectation. The peak recombination rate within hotspots can be hundreds or thousands of times that of the surrounding region. The PRDM9 protein is suspected to be a cause of hotspots in mammals. All hotspots so far characterized share similar morphology and are approximately 1.5 to 2.0 kb in width, which suggests a common causal process. Furthermore, recent studies have used patterns in linkage disequilibrium to identify over 25,000 hotspots in the human genome, suggesting that hotspots are a ubiquitous feature of the genome.