The discovery of mitotic recombination came from the observation of twin spotting in Drosophila melanogaster. This twin spotting, or mosaic spotting, was observed in D. melanogaster as early as 1925, but it was only in 1936 that Curt Stern explained it as a result of mitotic recombination. Prior to Stern's work, it was hypothesized that twin spotting happened because certain genes had the ability to eliminate the chromosome on which they were located. Later experiments uncovered when mitotic recombination occurs in the cell cycle and the mechanisms behind recombination.
