The impact of sequence divergence and DNA mismatch repair on homeologous recombination in Arabidopsis

We examined the effects of substrate divergence and DNA mismatch repair (MMR) on recombination in Arabidopsis thaliana. Relative to the frequency observed in plants with a homologous construct (0% divergence), recombination was decreased 4.1-, 9.6-, 11.7- or 20.3-fold, respectively, in lines with constructs containing 0.5%, 2%, 4% or 9% divergence between the recombination substrates. To evaluate the contribution of the MMR system in this decrease, 12 independent reporter lines (two or three lines per reporter construct) were crossed to an AtMSH2 T-DNA insertional mutant. We examined the recombination frequency in progeny homozygous for a reporter T-DNA and homozygous either for the wild type or the mutant allele of AtMSH2. The loss of MMR activity led to a two- to ninefold increase in homeologous recombination and the size of the increase did not seem to correlate with the amount of divergence. Inversely, complementation of the insertional mutant with a wild-type cDNA of AtMSH2 reduced recombination. Our results demonstrate clearly that sequence divergence can dramatically reduce the recombination frequency in plants and that the MMR system plays a part in this decrease.