Meiotic recombination hot spots and cold spots

Meiotic recombination events are distributed unevenly throughout eukaryotic genomes. This inhomogeneity leads to distortions of genetic maps that can hinder the ability of geneticists to identify genes by map-based techniques . Various lines of evidence, particularly from studies of yeast, indicate t hat the distribution of recombination events might reflect, at least in par t, global features of chromosome structure, such as the distribution of mod ified nucleosomes.