Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA. jlupski@sanger.ac.uk
Homologous recombination between alleles or non-allelic paralogous sequences does not occur uniformly but is concentrated in 'hotspots' with high recombination rates. Recent studies of these hotspots show that they do not share common sequence motifs, but they do have other features in common.