Homologous Recombination in Monkey Cells and Human Cell-free Extracts

Abstract

Much of our understanding of the mechanisms of homologous recombination resulted from studies with bacteria, bacteriophages, and fungi. Bacteria and bacteriophages contributed much information because of the availability of a large number of genetic markers coupled with the ability to perform genetic crosses and examine the resulting DNA. Such an approach has been especially suitable with bacteriophages, where in an infected bacterium, the phage DNA can undergo replication and repeated rounds of recombination (for review, see Stahl 1979). Studies with fungi proved to be useful because the products of each meiosis are clustered in a single ascus, sometimes in an ordered array, representing individual strands of DNA at the time of meiotic crossing over. The development of in vitro systems for recombination had a major impact on our understanding of bacterial recombination. A most important development is the identification of the recA locus (Clark and Margulies 1965) and purification of...