UPGG Tuesday Seminar Series: "Homology-directed Repair at DNA Nicks: Implications for Cancer, Applications to Gene Therapy"

Dr. Maizels' laboratory has discovered a novel pathway that enables homology directed DNA repair to initiate at a nick. It is very efficient, and very useful for genome engineering, as gene targeting by a nick creates far less collateral damage than does a double-strand break. This alternative recombination pathway is normally suppressed by canonical recombination factors (RAD51, BRCA2), and may be active in cancers in which those factors are deficient. She speculates that this pathway is one source of loss-of-heterozygosity in such tumors.