Negative correlation between compositional symmetries and local recombination rates

Although still not much understood, the universal reverse complement symmetry in genomes may contain much information about the genome. In this article, under the hypothesis that recombination rate variations may be related to the high order DNA structure, we studied the association between local recombination rates and local symmetry levels in mouse, rat and human. We found significant negative correlations between recombination rates and reverse complement compositional symmetries in these three organisms. This negative correlation pattern also held at individual chromosome levels when data only from each individual chromosome was analyzed.