Some sorts of DNA damage tend to get repaired right at the edge of a cell's nucleus, Susan Gasser of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, and her colleagues have shown.
They followed the process of DNA repair by inducing a DNA double-strand break and tracking fluorescent proteins tagged near the site of the break. Damaged DNA was shunted to the edge of the nucleus — to a subcomplex of the nuclear pore that facilitates the exchange of RNA and proteins between the cytoplasm and the cell nucleus. The transport involved repair proteins that are bound to a protein called SUMO, and are also recognized by a pore-associated ubiquitin ligase, a type of enzyme.
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Molecular biology: On the mend. Nature 455, 1153 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/4551153b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4551153b