From reading the title, you might be just as confused as I was when I first read this article. But not to fear! Your confusion will hopefully be cleared up by the end of this post (cross your fingers!). Now on to the important stuff...the abstract of this article is from PubMed talks about Spo11, which is a protein involved in double-strand breaks (DSBs). DSB initiates meiotic recombination in S. cerevisiae, a species of yeast that is used in numerous biological studies.
Lets pause for a second and ponder what meiotic recombination might mean...done pondering? Well meiotic recombination is a genetic recombination process by which a molecule of nucleic acid (usually DNA, but can also be RNA) is broken and then joined to a different one. Meiotic recombination in eukaryotes facilitates chromosomal crossover. The crossover process leads to offspring's having different combinations of genes from those of their parents, and can occasionally produce new chimeric alleles (artificially constructed gene).
Spo11 is one of several proteins required for DSB formation, and was identified when DSB, in certain mutants, would covalently attach to it. Spo11 is strongly involved in these findings as "the catalytic subunit of the meiotic DNA cleavage activity." Why is this important? Well because these findings are the "first identification of a biochemical function for any of the gene products involved in DSB formation." Therefore, not only are these findings important, but they also have clear, supporting evidence that the mechanism of meiotic recombination initiation is evolutionarily preserved.
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