Homoeologous exchanges occur through intragenic recombination generating novel transcripts and proteins in wheat and other polyploids.

Recombination between homeologous chromosomes, also known as homeologous exchange (HE), plays a significant role in shaping genome structure and gene expression in interspecific hybrids and allopolyploids of several plant species. However, the molecular mechanisms that govern HEs are not well understood. Here, we studied HE events in the progeny of a nascent allotetraploid (genome AADD) derived from two diploid progenitors of hexaploid bread wheat using cytological and whole-genome sequence analyses. In total, 37 HEs were identified and HE junctions were mapped precisely. HEs exhibit typical patterns of homologous recombination hotspots, being biased toward low-copy, subtelomeric regions of chromosome arms and showing association with known recombination hotspot motifs. But, strikingly, while homologous recombination preferentially takes place upstream and downstream of coding regions, HEs are highly enriched within gene bodies, giving rise to novel recombinant transcripts, which in turn are predicted to generate new protein fusion variants. To test whether this is a widespread phenomenon, a dataset of high-resolution HE junctions was analyzed for allopolyploid Brassica, rice, Arabidopsis suecica, banana, and peanut. Intragenic recombination and formation of chimeric genes was detected in HEs of all species and was prominent in most of them. HE thus provides a mechanism for evolutionary novelty in transcript and protein sequences in nascent allopolyploids.