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DNA repair

Clamping down on copy errors

Nature volume 539, pages 498–499 (2016)Cite this article

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Repair enzymes must communicate across hundreds of nucleotides to undo errors made during DNA replication. Imaging reveals that the enzymes do this by forming a series of ring-like clamps that diffuse along the DNA. See Letter p.583

As we write up results for publication, any spelling errors are quickly identified by our computer's built-in spellchecker. However, this is not an invention of the modern world; nature has been using DNA spellcheckers for millions of years to avoid genetic errors that arise during DNA replication, which it corrects through a process called mismatch repair. In the bacterium Escherichia coli, repair requires communication between enzymes across long stretches of DNA, and how this occurs has been hotly debated for decades1,2,3. On page 583, Liu et al.4 help to solve this mystery by using state-of-the-art techniques to analyse mismatch repair at the single-molecule level.

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Figure 1: Scouting for errors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Neil M. Kad is in the School of Biosciences, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NJ, UK.,

    Neil M. Kad

  2. Bennett Van Houten is in the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology, University of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, Hillman Cancer Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA.,

    Bennett Van Houten

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  1. Neil M. Kad
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  2. Bennett Van Houten
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Molecular biology: DNA repair without flipping out

https://doi.org/10.1038/407687a

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Kad, N., Van Houten, B. Clamping down on copy errors. Nature 539, 498–499 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature20475

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