PURPOSE Defining the cytotoxicity of individual adducts in DNA is necessary for mechanistic understanding of human brain tumor resistance to therapeutic alkylating agents and for design of DNA repair-related antiresistance strategies. Our purpose is to characterize the sensitivity of human glioma cells to methyl-lexitropsin (Me-lex), a sequence-specific alkylator that produces 3-methyladenine (...

Several polymorphisms in the DNA repair gene are thought to have significant effects on cancer risk. We investigated the association of polymorphisms in the DNA repair genes XRCC1 Arg399Gln, XRCC3 Thr241Met, XPD Lys751Gln, XPG Asp1104His, APE1 Asp148Glu, and HOGG1 Ser326Cys with endometriosis risk. Genotypes were determined by PCR-RFLP assays in 52 patients with endometriosis and 101 age-matche...

Campylobacter jejuni is a leading cause of bacterial gastroenteritis in the developed world. Despite its prevalence, its mechanisms of pathogenesis are poorly understood. Peptidoglycan (PG) is important for helical shape, colonization, and host-pathogen interactions in C. jejuni Therefore, changes in PG greatly impact the physiology of this organism. O-acetylation of peptidoglycan (OAP) is a ba...

8-Hydroxyguanine (8OHG), an oxidatively damaged base, and benzo[a]pyrene-diol-epoxide (BPDE), a metabolite of benzo[a]pyrene found in cigarette smoke, are thought to be major causes for G:C to T:A transversions in DNA of human cells. In this study, we assessed the abilities of OGG1, MYH and APE1 proteins, which are components of a base excision repair pathway, to suppress G:C to T:A transversio...

Apurinic/apyrimidinic (AP) sites are common mutagenic and cytotoxic DNA lesions. Ape1 is the major human repair enzyme for abasic sites and incises the phosphodiester backbone 5' to the lesion to initiate a cascade of events aimed at removing the AP moiety and maintaining genetic integrity. Through resequencing of genomic DNA from 128 unrelated individuals, and searching published reports and s...

Clustered damages-two or more closely opposed abasic sites, oxidized bases or strand breaks-are induced in DNA by ionizing radiation and by some radiomimetic drugs. They are potentially mutagenic or lethal. High complexity, multilesion clusters (three or more lesions) are hypothesized as repair-resistant and responsible for the greater biological damage induced by high linear energy transfer ra...

DNA single-strand breaks containing 3'-8-oxoguanine (3'-8-oxoG) ends can arise as a consequence of ionizing radiation and as a result of DNA polymerase infidelity by misincorporation of 8-oxodGMP. In this study we examined the mechanism of repair of 3'-8-oxoG within a single-strand break using purified base excision repair enzymes and human whole cell extracts. We find that 3'-8-oxoG inhibits l...

Base excision DNA repair (BER) is fundamentally important in handling diverse lesions produced as a result of the intrinsic instability of DNA or by various endogenous and exogenous reactive species. Defects in the BER process have been associated with cancer susceptibility and neurodegenerative disorders. BER funnels diverse base lesions into a common intermediate, apurinic/apyrimidinic (AP) s...

of nicked DNA substrates. This finding could be of therapeutic importance. Dideoxynucleoside drugs and their analogues — such as ddC, ddI, AZT, D4T and T3C — are not usually incorporated into genomic DNA in large amounts. But they do get into our genome through the action of polymerase b, which can incorporate them into repair patches during base excision repair 8 , and through another polymera...