Dr Jacob Dalgaard, Principal Research Fellow, Biomedical Cell Biology Division, University of Warwick, will present this seminar on 'The potential direct role of polymerase α in alkylation DNA damage repair'.

Abstract

Polymerase a is an essential enzyme mostly involved in lagging strand replication where it mediates Okazaki fragment synthesis. A specific point mutation of Schizosaccharomyces pombe polymerase a, named swi7, was shown to abolish the imprinting required for mating-type switching without affecting the essential function of the enzyme. This seminar investigates whether this mutation confers any genome wide defects and demonstrates that the swi7 mutation renders cells hypersensitive to the DNA damaging agents methyl metansulfonate (MMS), hydroxyurea (HU) and UV. In addition, in the swi7 background, cells are characterized by an elevated level of repair foci and recombination, indicative of increased genetic instability. Data therefore suggests that the swi7 mutation affects the general replication process, and it has been detected that novel swi1, swi3 and swi7 dependent alkylation damage repair intermediates, suggesting that swi7 might have a direct role in alkylation damage repair. An epitasis analysis shows that rad2 (Fen1) is epistatic with swi7, but not with swi1 and swi3, with regards to MMS sensitivity. The novel repair intermediates are also absent from MMS treated rad2 cells.

Further information

All staff and students are welcome and there is no need to register in advance. If you have any queries, please contact Gemma Wild at G dot Wild at warwick dot ac dot uk

This research seminar is part of the Biomedical Cell Biology Seminar series, presented by the Division of Biomedical Cell Biology, Warwick Medical School.