Werner syndrome is an inherited human progeriod syndrome caused by mutations in the gene encoding the Werner Syndrome protein, WRN. It has both 3'-5' DNA helicase and exonuclease activities, and is suggested to have roles in many aspects of DNA metabolism, including DNA repair and telomere maintenance. The DNA-PK complex also functions in both DNA double strand break repair and telomere mainten...

Copyright © 2015 by Hirosaki University. All rights reserved. Ionizing radiation is a potent genotoxic agent that can induce delayed biological effects referred to as genomic instability. Delayed chromosomal instability has been studied as a typical phenotype of genomic instability in the progeny of irradiated cells, but the mechanisms by which it arises remain obscure. The previous chromosome ...

Werner syndrome (WS) is a hallmark premature aging disease, in which the patients appear much older than their chronological age, and exhibit many of the clinical signs and symptoms of normal aging at an early stage in life. They develop many age-associated diseases early in life including atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, cataracts and display a high incidence of cancer. WS is also marked by incr...

While all known natural isolates of C. elegans contain multiple copies of the Tc1 transposon, which are active in the soma, Tc1 transposition is fully silenced in the germline of many strains. We mutagenized one such silenced strain and isolated mutants in which Tc1 had been activated in the germline ("mutators"). Interestingly, many other transposons of unrelated sequence had also become activ...