The process of mismatch repair was first postulated to explain the results of experiments on genetic recombination and bacterial mutagenesis. Mismatch repair has long been known to play a major role in two cellular processes: (1) the repair of errors made during DNA replication or as the result of some types of chemical damage to DNA and DNA precursors; and (2) the processing of recombination i...

Homeologous recombination between divergent DNA sequences is inhibited by DNA mismatch repair. In Escherichia coli, MutS and MutL respond to DNA mismatches within recombination intermediates and prevent strand exchange via an unknown mechanism. Here, using purified proteins and DNA substrates, we find that in addition to mismatches within the heteroduplex region, secondary structures within the...

OBJECTIVE Compare the processing of music-syntactic irregularities and physical oddballs between cochlear implant (CI) users and matched controls. METHODS Musical chord sequences were presented, some of which contained functionally irregular chords, or a chord with an instrumental timbre that deviated from the standard timbre. RESULTS In both controls and CI users, functionally irregular ch...

Recent work suggests that the eukaryotic system responsible for repairing DNA mismatches, and so correcting replication errors, is more complex than was thought; its multiple components have many cellular functions.

Many components of the cell, including lipids, proteins and both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, are vulnerable to deleterious modifications caused by reactive oxygen species. If not repaired, oxidative DNA damage can lead to disease-causing mutations, such as in cancer. Base excision repair and nucleotide excision repair are the two DNA repair pathways believed to orchestrate the removal of oxi...

Background: Slipped-DNAs are mutagenic intermediates in disease-causing trinucleotide repeat instability; their processing is not well understood. Results: MutLα is required to repair single short slip-outs, and enhances repair of clustered slipouts. Conclusion: Aberrant mismatch repair attempts on clustered slip-outs may cause repeat instability. Significance: This work has determined one of t...

In Xenopus egg extracts, DNA strand breaks (nicks) located 3' or 5' to a mismatch cause an overall 3-fold stimulation of the repair of the mismatch in circular heteroduplex DNA molecules. The increase in mismatch repair is almost entirely due to an increase in repair of the nicked strand, which is stimulated 5-fold. Repair synthesis is centered to the mismatch site, decreases symmetrically on b...

The MutS protein initiates DNA mismatch repair by recognizing mispaired and unpaired bases embedded in duplex DNA and activating endo- and exonucleases to remove the mismatch. Members of the MutS family also possess a conserved ATPase activity that belongs to the ATP binding cassette (ABC) superfamily. Here we report the crystal structure of a ternary complex of MutS-DNA-ADP and assays of initi...