Maintenance of genome integrity is a fundamental requirement of all organisms. To address this, organisms have evolved extremely faithful modes of replication, DNA repair and chromosome segregation to combat the deleterious effects of an unstable genome. Nonetheless, a small amount of genome instability is the driver of evolutionary change and adaptation, and thus a low level of instability is ...

Changes in DNA superhelicity during DNA replication are mediated primarily by the activities of DNA helicases and topoisomerases. If these activities are defective, the progression of the replication fork can be hindered or blocked, which can lead to double-strand breaks, elevated recombination in regions of repeated DNA, and genome instability. Hereditary diseases like Werner's and Bloom's Syn...

it is clear that colorectal cancer (crc) develops through multiple genetic and epigenetic pathways. these pathways may be determined on the basis of three molecular features: (i) mutations in dna mismatch repair genes, leading to a dna microsatellite instability (msi) phenotype, (ii) mutations in apc and other genes that activate wnt pathway, characterized by chromosomal instability (cin) pheno...