Statistical Analysis of Chromatid Interference

The nonrandom occurrence of crossovers along a single strand during meiosis can be caused by either chromatid interference, crossover interference or both. Although crossover interference has been consistently observed in almost all organisms since the time of the first linkage studies, chromatid interference has not been as thoroughly discussed in the literature, and the evidence provided for it is inconsistent. In this paper with virtually no restrictions on the nature of crossover interference, we describe the constraints that follow from the assumption of no chromatid interference for single spore data. These constraints are necessary consequences of the assumption of no chromatid interference, but their satisfaction is not sufficient to guarantee no chromatid interference. Models can be constructed in which chromatid interference clearly exists but is not detectable with single spore data. We then extend our analysis to cover tetrad data, which permits more powerful tests of no chromatid interference. We note that the traditional test of no chromatid interference based on tetrad data does not make full use of the information provided by the data, and we offer a statistical procedure for testing the no chromatid interference constraints that does make full use of the data. The procedure is then applied to data from several organisms. Although no strong evidence of chromatid interference is found, we do observe an excess of two-strand double recombinations, i.e., negative chromatid interference.