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The serendipitous dawn of DNA repair

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 21, page 569 (2020)Cite this article

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The paper ‘Effect of visible light on the recovery of Streptomyces griseus conidia from ultra-violet irradiation injury’, which appeared in PNAS in February 1949, was written by a single author: Dr Albert Kelner, a young research fellow at The Biological Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, NY. His fellowship had almost ended, and his professional future was uncertain. The paper summarized his persistent efforts to understand a phenomenon that had repeatedly plagued his experiments, in which he used ultraviolet (UV) irradiation to mutagenize Escherichia coli bacteria and the fungus S. griseus. What frustrated him was the extreme variability in the lethal effect of UV radiation on different plates within the same experiment. Solving this mystery was not his primary mission in the lab, and his persistent attempts to understand its source hastened his mentor’s decision to terminate his position. He nevertheless kept at it until he finally discovered it was the visible light pouring from the windows or the lab’s white lamps that made the difference. Exposure to visible light immediately after UV irradiation led to sweeping recovery from otherwise lethal UV doses!

This finding resonated with earlier sporadic observations of the effect of visible light on the mutagenicity of UV radiation. Kelner’s conclusion was that “much of the killing of ultra-violet light is due to a light-labile alteration in some constituent in the cell. Exposure to visible light restores this altered constituent to its former state” (Kelner, 1949). More than seven decades later, we call that cellular constituent ‘DNA’ and its restoration ‘DNA repair’, but the conceptual breakthrough was there. The phenomenon that sidetracked Kelner’s work was enzymatic photoreactivation: in situ repair of the major DNA lesions that are induced by UV radiation — cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers and pyrimidine–pyrimidone (6–4) photoproduct — by light-induced repair enzymes called photolyases.

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References

Original articles

  • Kelner, A. Effect of visible light on the recovery of Streptomyces griseus conidia from ultra-violet irradiation injury. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 35, 73–79 (1949)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Dulbecco, R. Reactivation of ultra-violet-inactivated bacteriophage by visible light. Nature 163, 949 (1949)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

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  1. Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, Tel Aviv University School of Medicine, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Yosef Shiloh

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  1. Yosef Shiloh
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Correspondence to Yosef Shiloh.

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Shiloh, Y. The serendipitous dawn of DNA repair. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 21, 569 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-020-00286-x

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