Unleashing meiotic crossovers in crops

Improved plant varieties are hugely significant in our attempts to face the challenges of a growing human population and limited planet resources. Plant breeding relies on meiotic crossovers to combine favorable alleles into elite varieties1. However, meiotic crossovers are relatively rare, typically one to three per chromosome2, limiting the efficiency of the breeding process and related activities such as genetic mapping. Several genes that limit meiotic recombination were identified in the model species Arabidopsis2. Mutation of these genes in Arabidopsis induces a large increase in crossover frequency. However, it remained to be demonstrated whether crossovers could also be increased in crop species hybrids. Here, we explored the effects of mutating the orthologs of FANCM3, RECQ44 or FIGL15 ...