Genome complexity: Mechanisms of DNA repair (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, July 05, 2015, 23:18 (3211 days ago) @ David Turell

DNA is tightly wound making repair difficult on the side next to the histone:-http://phys.org/news/2015-07-mechanism-dna.html-"The dense packing allows DNA molecule with a length of about two meters to fit into a microscopic cell nucleus, but it makes significant surfaces of the DNA inaccessible for the repair enzymes—the proteins that manage the "repair" of damaged DNA regions. The damage of the DNA, if not repaired, leads to accumulation of mutations, cell death, and to the development of various diseases, including neurodegenerative, e.g. Alzheimer's disease.-***-"Scientists know quite a lot about the mechanism of the repair. It is known that for the synthesis of a protein, information written in the genetic code, which could be imagined as the manual for its assembly where triples of nucleotides match certain amino acids, should be taken out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm of the cell.-"Thin and long strand of the DNA is packed in the nucleus and can tear at the exit to the outside. Moreover, it cannot be sacrificed as the cell's nuclear DNA is is only present in two copies. Therefore, when it is necessary to synthesize specific protein, small region of DNA is unwound, the two strands are disconnected, and the information on the protein structure with one of the DNA strands is written in form of RNA, single-stranded molecule. The mRNA molecule, which serves as the template for making a protein, is synthesized by the principle of complementarity: each nucleotide pair corresponds to another one.-***-"During the transcription of information (its rewriting into RNA) the RNA polymerase enzyme "rides" on the DNA chain, and stops when it finds the break. Like a proofreader of a text, RNA polymerase after it is stalled, triggers a cascade of reactions, resulting in the repair enzymes fixing the damaged area. At the same time, the RNA polymerase cannot detect discontinuities present in the other DNA strand.-"'We have shown, not yet in the cell, but in vitro, that the repair of breaks in the other DNA chain, which is "hidden" in the nucleosome, is still possible. According to our hypothesis, it occurs due to the formation of special small DNA loops in the nucleosome, although normally DNA wounds around the histone "spool" very tightly",—says Vasily M. Studitsky,—"The loops form when the DNA is coiled back on nucleosome together with polymerase. RNA polymerase can "crawl" along the DNA loops nearly as well as on histone-free DNA regions, but when it stops near locations of the DNA breaks, it "panics", triggering the cascade of reactions to start DNA "repairs".-"During the experiment, special sites, where single-stranded breaks can be introduced by adding specific enzymes in a test tube, were inserted into the DNA. Then a single nucleosome transcribed by a single RNA molecule was studied. In this model system, which was developed in 2002 by the same group of scientists, histones were assembled on the molecule with an accuracy within one nucleotide. Having specially introduced breaks at precise locations on the DNA, the researchers examined the impact of breaks on the progression of the RNA polymerase. It turned out that only in nucleosomes, rather than in the histone-free DNA, the enzyme stopped, when the break was present in the other DNA strand. Wherein it did not stop before the break, but immediately after it. It was difficult enough to understand the mechanism that allows it to notice the damage at the "back" of RNA polymerase, as if it had "eyes on the back of the head", although, obviously, it does not have neither one nor the other.-"The analysis of breaks in different positions allowed to hypothesize that stalling of RNA polymerase is caused by the formation of the loop, which blocks movement of the enzyme. The findings open up a new direction for the work on the subject of DNA repair."