Figure 3.

Variation in genome-wide recombination rates between and within individuals.

(a) Boxplot of global recombination rates showing the interquartile range (box), median (horizontal bar), and whiskers (1.5× IQR). Numbers analysed are in parentheses. Rates from foetal oocytes (‘Gruhn’)²⁹ and female pronucleus-PB trios (‘Hou’)¹⁰.

(b) Recombination rates for the 10 donors. Black: rates using information from oocyte or embryo only. Magenta: rates using the information from the complete oocyte-PB trios.

(c) Inter-crossover distances, excluding centromeric distances. The fitted curve is based on maximum likelihood estimation of the gamma distribution, shape: 2.6141 ± 0.14 (S.E.), rate 0.066 ± 0.0039 (S.E.). Estimated fitted mean: 39.3 Mb, log-likehood of fitting: −2802.738 ; AIC: 5609.476.

(d) Average and standard deviation of chromosome-specific recombination (Supplementary Table 3). GLM analysis revealed that chromosome size had a significant effect on sex-specific recombination frequencies. Spearman correlation test is shown for the p-value for individual, pair-wise comparisons between maternal and paternal recombination frequencies per chromosome. As chromosome size decreases, the contribution of sex to crossover frequencies decreases (see Source Data for Fig. 3d).

(e) Crossover position relative to centromeres (CEN), normalized to chromosome length. Statistics: Two-sided Kolmogorov-Smirnov test of normalized and absolute lengths; p < 0.0005; X chr. excluded; Supplementary Figure 5).

(f) Length of haplotype blocks (not inter-crossover distances), according to position relative to telomeres (blue), centromeres (yellow), or interstitial (green). Statistics: non-parametric ANOVA (p < 0.0001). Centromeric blocks excluded the ~ 3 × 10⁶ base pairs of alpha-satellite DNA.

(g) Variation in centromere repression of crossovers in oocyte-PB trios from the same donor.