Latest DNA repair Stories

Catalysts assist in chemical reactions without undergoing any alteration of their own. In the cells of living organisms, proteins perform this important function. They carry out the metabolism fundamental to all living processes. Proteins are instrumental in cellular respiration, they for instance reduce oxygen to water and oxidize food into carbon dioxide. This releases the energy that makes life possible at all.Proteins cannot perform these functions on their own. They depend on small...

Rearrangements of all sizes in genomes, genes and exons can result from a glitch in DNA copying that occurs when the process stalls at a critical point and then shifts to a different genetic template, duplicating and even triplicating genes or just shuffling or deleting part of the code within them, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in a recent report in the journal Nature Genetics. The report further elucidated the effect of the fork stalling and template switching mechanism...

Tumor-suppressor recruits help to overcome a barrier and fix cancer-causing defectsLike a mechanic popping the hood of a car to get at a faulty engine, a tumor-suppressing protein allows cellular repair mechanisms to pounce on damaged DNA by overcoming a barrier to DNA access.Reporting online at Nature Cell Biology this week, a research team led by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center shows that BRIT1 connects with another protein complex to relax DNA's tight...

A person's DNA is often damaged by a number of different chemical contaminants, and if not repaired properly, it can lead to the development of cancer and other diseases. Through an international collaboration, University of Alberta researchers Chris Le and Michael Weinfeld have discovered how damaged DNA is recognized and repaired. This could lead to improved treatment of cancer and other diseases.The team, from the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, used a new technology to monitor the...

Those stubborn grey hairs that come with age really are signs of stress, albeit of the cellular kind, according to a new Japanese study.Genotoxic stress, which is anything that damages our DNA, sets off a chain reaction in which specialized cells known as melanocyte stem cells (MSCs) become damaged, ultimately resulting in a malfunction of the cells responsible for hair color.Scientists discovered that the type of genotoxic stress that damages DNA depletes the MSCs in hair follicles that make...

Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center investigators have uncovered a mechanism that helps explain how lithium, a drug widely used to treat bipolar mood disorder, also protects the brain from damage that occurs during radiation treatments.In the May 1 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Fen Xia, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues show that lithium promotes DNA repair in healthy cells but not in brain tumor cells. The findings suggest that lithium treatment could offer a way to protect healthy...

One can have a dream, two can make that dream so real, goes a popular song. Now a Weizmann Institute study has revealed that it takes two to perform an essential form of DNA repair.Prof. Zvi Livneh of the Weizmann Institute's Biological Chemistry Department has been studying DNA repair for some two decades: "˜Considering that the DNA of each cell is damaged about 20,000 times a day by radiation, pollutants and harmful chemicals produced within the body, it's obvious that without effective...

U.S. scientists say they've determined immune cells don't kill bacteria by damaging their DNA, reversing a widespread assumption in the scientific community. The University of Illinois researchers said they discovered macrophages -- the immune cells that engulf and kill bacteria -- direct their attack on targets outside the bacteria's membrane-bound cytoplasm. University of Illinois Graduate student Maureen Craig and Professor James Slauch said they discovered macrophages kill bacteria with...

Some DNA repair enzymes can become double-edged swords "“ If they work too slowly, they can block necessary cell maintenance and contribute to cell death. This could explain the somewhat mysterious success of the widely used cancer drug 5-Fluorouracil (5FU) and help clinicians to predict patient's response to chemotherapy, according to new findings from the University of Basel, Switzerland. The work, published in this week's issue of PLoS Biology, reports that 5FU keeps the DNA-repair...

 For decades, microbiologists assumed that macrophages, immune cells that can engulf and poison bacteria and other pathogens, killed microbes by damaging their DNA. A new study from the University of Illinois disproves that.The study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, shows that macrophages focus their most potent poisons, known as reactive oxygen species (ROS), on targets outside the cytoplasm.Macrophages are voracious eaters that "swallow" cellular debris and invading...