In mammalian cells, the Ku autoantigen is an end- binding DNA protein required for the repair of DNA breaks [Troelstra, C. and Jaspers, N.G.J. (1994) Curr. Biol., 4, 1149- 1151]. A yeast gene (HDF1) encoding a putative homologue of the 70 kDa subunit of Ku has recently been identified [Feldmann, H. and Winnacker, E. L. (1993) J. Biol. Chem., 268, 12895- 12900]. We find that hdf1 mutant strains ...