Meiotic gene conversion has an important role in allele diversification and in the homogenization of gene and other repeat DNA sequence families 1-5 , sometimes with pathological consequences 6,7 . But little is known about the dynamics of gene conversion in humans and its relationship to meiotic crossover. We therefore developed screening and selection methods to characterize sperm conversions in two meiotic crossover hot spots in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) 8 and one in the sex chromosomal pseudoautosomal pairing region PAR1 (ref. 9). All three hot spots are active in gene conversion and crossover. Conversion tracts are short and define a steep bidirectional gradient centered at the peak of crossover activity, consistent with crossovers and conversions being produced by the same recombination-initiating events. These initiations seem to be spread over a narrow zone, rather than occurring at a single site, and seem preferentially to yield conversions rather than crossovers. Crossover breakpoints are more broadly diffused than conversion breakpoints, suggesting either differences between conversion and crossover processing after initiation or the existence of a quality control checkpoint at which short interactions between homologous chromosomes are preferentially aborted as conversions.Meiotic gene conversion in humans is defined as the recombinational transfer of information between alleles or loci without crossover. (This definition, though widely used, is not necessarily congruent with conversion classically defined by non-2:2 meiotic segregation ratios and does not include crossovers accompanied by conversion.) Homogenization events in multigene and dispersed repeat sequence families and in palindromic DNA 3-5 , as well as the direct detection of de novo conversion events in families 6,10 and in sperm 11,12 , provide extensive evidence for interlocus conversion. Indirect evidence for interallelic conversion comes from seemingly anomalous low levels of linkage disequilibrium seen between some closely linked markers 13 and from patchwork patterns of allelic diversity 14,15 (though such patchworks could arise from sequential crossovers). Sperm analysis at the HLA-DPB1 locus has provided direct evidence that true interallelic conversions do occur, though at low frequency 16 . The relationship between crossover and conversion in humans, however, is unclear.The high-resolution definition of human crossover hot spots by sperm typing 8,9,15 has allowed us to investigate the connection between crossover and interallelic conversion without crossover. We chose the hot spot DNA3 located in the MHC for analysis 8 , because of its intense crossover activity and the availability of sperm donors with multiple single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) heterozygosities needed to monitor recombination events. Our initial approach was similar to that used to detect conversion in HLA-DPB1 (ref. 16; Fig. 1a). We amplified pools of sperm DNA by PCR using allele-specific primers outside the hot spot to amplify one haplo...