Evelyn Witkin just won the Lasker Prize (often a prelude the Nobel) for her pioneering work on DNA repair . As I explained in my lecture, the polymerase that quickly repairs damaged DNA (eg by UV light) is a "sloppier copier" - it has to work very quickly to copy the short error-free (parental) strand, after removing the stretch that contains the damage. To do this fast, it dispenses with proofreading, which of course greatly increases the mutation rate, and can lead to cancer - a disease that's closely related to the Eigen "error catastrophe".
see http://bcove.me/a7l91kqj for a nice video on mismatch repair (which is repair of replicative errors).
No comments:
Post a Comment