In a paper published online in advance in PNAS this week, investigators at the University of Geneva and elsewhere show that "loss of DNA methylation affects the recombination landscape in Arabidopsis." More specifically, the researchers report that while analyzing meiotic recombination in mutant plants with hypomethylated DNA, they "observed unexpected and counterintuitive effects of DNA methylation losses on CO [cross-over] distribution," and further evidence suggesting to them that loss of DNA meythlation leads to a global redistribution of crossovers along chromosomes.