A comparison and assessment of computational method for identifying recombination hotspots in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Meiotic recombination is one of the most important driving forces of biological evolution, which is initiated by double-strand DNA breaks. Recombination has important roles in genome diversity and evolution. This review firstly provides a comprehensive survey of the 15 computational methods developed for identifying recombination hotspots in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. These computational methods were discussed and compared in terms of underlying algorithms, extracted features, predictive capability and practical utility. Subsequently, a more objective benchmark data set was constructed to develop a new predictor iRSpot-Pse6NC2.0 (http://lin-group.cn/server/iRSpot-Pse6NC2.0). To further demonstrate the generalization ability of these methods, we compared iRSpot-Pse6NC2.0 with existing methods on the chromosome XVI of S. cerevisiae. The results of the independent data set test demonstrated that the new predictor is superior to existing tools in the identification of recombination hotspots. The iRSpot-Pse6NC2.0 will become an important tool for identifying recombination hotspot.