Sexual dimorphism and the effect of wild introgressions on recombination in Manihot esculenta

Recombination has essential functions in evolution, meiosis, and breeding. Here, we use the multi-generational pedigree, consisting of 7,165 informative meioses (3,679 female; 3,486 male), and genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) data from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) to study recombination in cassava (Manihot esculenta). We detected recombination events using SHAPEIT2 and duoHMM, examined the recombination landscape across the 18 chromosomes of cassava and in regions with known introgressed segments from cassava’s wild relative Manihot glaziovii, constructed a genetic map and compared it to an existing map constructed by the International Cassava Genetic Map Consortium (ICGMC), and inspected patterns of recombination placement in male and female meioses to see if there is evidence of sexual dimorphism in crossover distribution and frequency. We found that the placement of crossovers along chromosomes did not vary between the two sexes but that females undergo more meiotic recombination than males. We also observed that introgressions from M. glaziovii decreased recombination in the introgressed region and, in the case of chromosome 4, along the entire length of the chromosome that the introgression is on. We observed a dosage effect on chromosome 1, possibly suggesting the presence of a variant on the M. glaziovii haplotype that leads to lower overall recombination in the introgressed region.