Project Summary
Near UV radiation (254nm light) induces DNA damage that blocks replication can result
in genomic rearrangements when it resumes from the wrong place, mutagenesis when the
incorrect base is incorporated opposite to the lesion, or cell death when the block to replication
cannot be overcome. Inaccurate replication in the presence of environmental mutagens such as
UV is responsible for the majority of mutagenesis and rearrangements observed in cancer cells.
Thus, understanding how disrupted replication forks are restored is critical to developing
therapeutics and strategies for preventing instabilities associated with these events. In humans,
the role of BRCA2 and RECQ proteins in maintaining and processing replication forks that
encounter DNA damage is well known. However, the mechanism by which replication is
restored remains unclear. Different models have suggested that either repair, translesion
synthesis, or recombination may operate to allow replication to resume. Yet, these pathways do
not all share equally beneficial outcomes. Whereas DNA repair is error free, translesion
synthesis and recombination are associated with elevated rates of mutations and genome
rearrangements respectively. Thus critical to advancing the field, is a clear determination of the
mechanism by which DNA replication resumes following disruption.
This work will demonstrate that replication forks disrupted by UV-induced DNA damage
are primarily processed through a general recovery mechanism that allows nucleotide excision
repair enzymes to access to the blocking lesion and effect repair. Most in vitro studies suggest
that the replisome is disrupted by DNA lesions in the leading strand template, but not lagging
strand template. Further leading strand lesion on plasmid substrates are preferentially processed
through nucleotide excision repair. Thus the first aim of this proposal will utilize CPD-seq, an
established high-throughput sequencing approach, to map the repair of UV lesions over time on
E. coli genome and demonstrate that leading strand lesions are preferentially repaired during
replication. The second aim of the proposal characterizes the role that holC, encoding the χ
subunit of the replisome, play in the replication-coupled repair. holC mutations are epistatic with
recF mutants which is specifically required to process and resume replication after disruption by
UV-induced damage. Further, HolC (χ) is reported to physically interact with UvrA. Therefore
this aim seeks to and demonstrate that the interaction occurs in response to and functions
following UV damage and demonstrate that the replication-coupled repair depends on the
presence of holC.