Agricultural Genomics: Commercial Applications Bring Increased Basic Research Power

Homologous recombination has been a focus of basic research for over a hundred years [1–3]. The advent of genomics has allowed fine-scale analyses of recombination, including genomewide analysis of global recombination rate [4–6] and hotspot usage (the proportion of recombination that occurs at hotspots) [4,6]. Recently, PLOS Genetics published the work of Ma et al. [7] describing a genome-wide association study of global recombination rate in Holstein cattle using 3,224 males and 53,125 females and hotspot usage using 1,772 males and 12,756 females. The recombination rate and hotspot usage phenotypes were estimated using 223,364 samples that belonged to 185,917 three-generation families, which were extracted from the larger pedigree that contained over half a million Holstein cattle when the research was conducted.