A New Hypothesis Conerning the Sequence and Nature of Meiotic Events in the Female of Drosophila Melanogaster

Three of the basic phenomena comprising the meiotic process are synapsis, crossingover, and disjunction. It is generally conceded that some form of pairing must precede crossingover; that the crossingover process occurs prior to disjunction; and that disjunction implies a previous association of elements. Construction of a model describing the causal relations among the three events might be expected to be fairly simple, since the possibilities are limited. Yet, no model has been proposed that is consistent with all the genetic data.