Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
wikibiotech.com/dna-repair-mechanisms/
12/19/2016
Though a very strict proof reading system is active during DNA synthesis but still errors including mismatched basepairing or addition of one or more than one extra nucleotides can take place. Moreover, DNA is always subjected to
1/6
environmental factors that cause the insertion or deletion of nucleotides. These factor can include agents which can
either be chemical in nature, for instance, nitrous oxide, or radiation, for example, UV, which can combine two
pyrimidines adjacent to one another in the DNA, and high energy rays, which can lead to double stranded breaks.
Nucleotide bases are also lost from mammalian cells at a rate of several thousand nucleotides per cell per day. If the
damage is not repaired via DNA repair, it can cause a permanent change (mutation) in DNA which can result in many
harmful eects, including failure to control the cell division, leading to cancer. Fortunately, cells are very ecient at
repairing damage caused to their DNA. Major repair systems include recognition of the lesion on the DNA, deletion of
the damaged site, replacement of the gap left by deletion using the complementary strand as a template for DNA
synthesis, and ligation. Therefore, these repair systems carry out excision repair, with excision of one to 10s of bases,
and it reduces the error proportion from one in ten million nucleotides to one in a billion. Four main types of DNA
repair systems are explained below.
1) Methyl-directed Mismatch Repair
Occasionally, errors during DNA replication escape the proof reading activity of DNA polymerase, leading to mismatch
of one to numerous nucleotides. In Escherichia coli, mismatch repair is carried out by a proteins referred to as the Mut
proteins (Fig A). Homologous proteins are found in humans. This repair system proceeds in following steps.
Step I: Identication of the Mismatch Strand
When mismatch occurs during DNA synthesis, the Mut proteins must be capable of dierentiating between correct
strand and the strand containing mismatch. The dierence is based on the degree of methylation. GATC sequences
are found almost every one thousand bases, and these are methylated on adenine residues. This is not carried out
instantly after synthesis, so this makes newly synthesized DNA distinguished as it is hemimethylated i.e., the parent
strand is fully methylated but the daughter strand is not methylated. The methylated parent strand is considered to be
correct and the daughter strand undergoes for repair.
2/6
3/6
4/6
5/6
6/6