Caffeine potentiates the mutagenic and lethal effects of genotoxic agents. It is thought that this is due, at least in some organisms, to inhibition of DNA repair. However, direct evidence for inhibition of repair enzymes has been lacking. Using purified Escherichia coli DNA photolyase and (A)BC excinuclease, we show that the drug inhibits photoreactivation and nucleotide excision repair by two...

Oxidative stress is a very frequent source of DNA damage. Many cellular DNA polymerases (Pols) can incorporate ribonucleotides (rNMPs) during DNA synthesis. However, whether oxidative stress-triggered DNA repair synthesis contributes to genomic rNMPs incorporation is so far not fully understood. Human specialized Pols β and λ are the important enzymes involved in the oxidative stress tolerance,...

In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, some gene loci manifest gradients in the frequency of aberrant segregation in meiosis, with the high end of each gradient corresponding to a hotspot for DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). The slope of a gradient is reduced when mismatch repair functions fail to act upon heteroduplex DNA-aberrant segregation frequencies at the low end of the gradient are higher in the ...

Apurinic sites disappear from DNA during an incubation of the DNA with the Escherichia coli endonuclease specific for apurinic sites, DNA polymerase I (EC 2.7.7.7.), and T4 ligase (EC 6.5.1.1). Omission of any one of these three enzymes and, in particular, omission of the endonuclease specific for apurinic sites prevents this in vitro repair.

1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Materials and methods 3.1. Rat model of focal cerebral ischemia 3.2. Measurement of overall BER activity 3.3. Measurement of AP endonuclease activity 3.4. Measurement of DNA polymerase-beta activity 3.5. Western blot analysis 3.6. Quantitative measurement of AP sites in nuclear DNA 3.7. Detection of DNA single-strand breaks 3.8. Statistical analysis 4. Results 4.1...

down's syndrome (ds) is the most common chromosomal abnormality in human. subjects with ds are known to be peridisposed to develop leukemia. the molecular basis of the association between ds and leukemia is unknown. the unscheduled dna synthesis (uds) test measure the ability of dna-repair in mammalian cells after excision of a stretch of dna containing the region of damage induced by chem...

The Mre11/Rad50/Nbs1 (MRN) complex initiates and coordinates DNA repair and signaling events at double-strand breaks. The interaction between MRN and DNA ends is critical for the recruitment of DNA-processing enzymes, end tethering, and activation of the ATM protein kinase. Here we visualized MRN binding to duplex DNA molecules using single-molecule FRET, and found that MRN unwinds 15-20 base p...

We characterize the changes in chromatin structure, DNA methylation and transcription during and after homologous DNA repair (HR). We find that HR modifies the DNA methylation pattern of the repaired segment. HR also alters local histone H3 methylation as well chromatin structure by inducing DNA-chromatin loops connecting the 5' and 3' ends of the repaired gene. During a two-week period after r...