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Cancer

Catalyst of a catalyst

Breast cancers arise when the BRCA2 protein is defective, but what does the normal enzyme do? Studies of a relative of BRCA2 reveal a capacity to initiate the repair of broken DNA by loading a repair protein.

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Figure 1: Model for the function of BRCA2, based on the findings of Yang et al2.

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Kowalczykowski, S. Catalyst of a catalyst. Nature 433, 591–592 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/433591a

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