Science 322, 597–602 (2008)

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.