The meiotic recombination hotspots of Schizosaccharomyces pombe.

Meiotic recombination predominantly occurs at genomic loci referred to as recombination hotspots. The fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, has proved to be an excellent model organism in which to study details of the molecular basis of meiotic recombination hotspot activation. S. pombe has a number of different classes of meiotic hotspots, indicating that a single pathway does not confer hotspot activity throughout the genome. The M26-related hotspots are a particularly well characterised group of hotspots and details of the molecular activation of M26-related hotspots are now coming to light. Moreover, genome-wide DNA array analysis has been applied to the question of meiotic recombination in this organism and we are now starting to get a picture of recombination hotspot distribution on a genome-wide scale.