Illegitimate recombination

Illegitimate recombination, or nonhomologous recombination, is the process by which two unrelated double stranded segments of DNA are joined. This insertion of genetic material which is not meant to be adjacent tends to lead to genes being broken causing the protein which they encode to not be properly expressed. One of the primary pathways by which this will occur is the repair mechanism known as non-homologous end joining (NHEJ).