The molecular bases of meiotic recombination, a crucial step in plant reproduction, have been deciphered over the last 25 years thanks to the use of a few model species, Arabidopsis thaliana in the first instance and Oryza sativa in the second. The availability of mutants for identified meiotic genes in a wider range of angiosperms now makes it possible to assess the conservation and variation of this process in plants. In that spirit, Cuacos et al. (2021) used Brassica rapa mutants to confirm the link between meiotic recombination and chromosomal remodelling that was previously established in A. thaliana.