A Pedigree-Based Map of Crossovers and Noncrossovers in Aye-Ayes (Daubentonia madagascariensis)

Gaining a better understanding of the rates and patterns of meiotic recombination is crucial for improving evolutionary genomic modeling, with applications ranging from demographic to selective inference. Although previous research has provided important insights into the landscape of crossovers in humans and other haplorrhines, our understanding of both the considerably more common outcome of recombination (i.e. noncrossovers) as well as the landscapes in more distantly related primates (i.e. strepsirrhines) remains limited owing to difficulties associated with both the identification of noncrossover tracts as well as species sampling. Thus, in order to elucidate recombination patterns in this understudied branch of the primate clade, we here characterize crossover and noncrossover landscapes in aye-ayes utilizing whole-genome sequencing data from six three-generation pedigrees and three two-generation multi-sibling families, and in so doing provide novel insights into this important evolutionary process shaping genomic diversity in one of the world's most critically endangered primate species.