Deletions of 15q11.2-q12 are associated with either the Prader-Willi (PWS) or Angelman (AS) syndromes. It has been suggested that excessive recombination in this region might explain the high frequency of such deletions, and the frequent involvement of chromosome 15 in translocations and nondisjunction. We have studied recombination in the PWS region by linkage analysis of non-PWS families. No recombination was found (with maximum lod scores greater than 3.0) for most pairwise combinations of probes: 39, IR4-3R, ML34, 189-1, 3-21. A ‘hotspot’ of recombination is observed between loci detected by p3-21 and pIR10-1. The female recombination fraction in this region was significantly higher than that for males. Close linkage with 0.06 recombination was found for the IR10-1 and CMW-1 pair. No excess recombination was found between sites bounding common breakpoints observed in deletions associated with PWS and AS. It is suggested that these deletions form frequently because of the presence of duplicated DNA sequences and/or inversions in this region, and not because of a high rate of homologous recombination.