{"doi":"10.7554/elife.70990","title":"Analysis of meiosis in Pristionchus pacificus reveals plasticity in homolog pairing and synapsis in the nematode lineage","abstract":"Meiosis is conserved across eukaryotes yet varies in the details of its execution. Here we describe a new comparative model system for molecular analysis of meiosis, the nematode Pristionchus pacificus , a distant relative of the widely studied model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. P. pacificus shares many anatomical and other features that facilitate analysis of meiosis in C. elegans . However, while C. elegans has lost the meiosis-specific recombinase Dmc1 and evolved a recombination-independent mechanism to synapse its chromosomes, P. pacificus expresses both DMC-1 and RAD-51. We find that SPO-11 and DMC-1 are required for stable homolog pairing, synapsis, and crossover formation, while RAD-51 is dispensable for these key meiotic processes. RAD-51 and DMC-1 localize sequentially to chromosomes during meiotic prophase and show nonoverlapping functions. We also present a new genetic map for P. pacificus that reveals a crossover landscape very similar to that of C. elegans , despite marked divergence in the regulation of synapsis and crossing-over between these lineages.","journal":"eLife","year":2021,"id":164675,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":38,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9047,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":686701,"name":"Renzo Sebastián Adilardi","orcid":"0000-0001-7279-3853","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":607833,"name":"Therese Mitros","orcid":"0000-0001-6708-3988","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":650755,"name":"Barış Avşaroğlu","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":663738,"name":"Lewis Stevens","orcid":"0000-0002-6075-8273","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":302748,"name":"Simone Köhler","orcid":"0000-0002-1119-8855","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":687332,"name":"Joshua J. Bayes","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":687333,"name":"Clara Wang","orcid":null,"position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":687334,"name":"Sabrina Lin","orcid":null,"position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":687335,"name":"K Alienor Baskevitch","orcid":null,"position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":346053,"name":"Daniel S. Rokhsar","orcid":"0000-0002-8704-2224","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":23409,"name":"Abby F. Dernburg","orcid":"0000-0001-8037-1079","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":687331,"name":"Regina Rillo-Bohn","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":102,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:45:32.226038Z","pmid":"34427184","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}