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Excision repair invades the territory of mismatch repair

Nature Genetics volume 21, pages 247–249 (1999)Cite this article

Nature does not assign ordained roles to atoms, molecules, or biochemical pathways—this is a human exercise and one inspired by convenience. Over-reliance on classification, however, can impede understanding. On page 314 of this issue, Oliver Fleck and colleagues provide data that indicate previous categorizations of DNA repair pathways have been over-simplified. They show that nucleotide excision repair, a DNA repair pathway commonly thought to target damaged bases, removes normal but mismatched bases, a function usually assigned to mismatch-repair systems. A close examination of previous literature, however, reveals that these findings are not entirely unexpected.

The report by Fleck et al. provides the strongest evidence to date that—at least in Schizosaccharomyces pombe—nucleotide excision repair has a predominant role in correcting one type of mismatch (C•C) and has a secondary, yet physiologically relevant role in correcting other mismatches. These findings are an important addition to efforts aimed at understanding the substrate specificity of and functional overlap between mismatch repair and nucleotide excision repair. Several recent reports have revealed a close if not intimate cooperation between the two pathways. Three questions have been broached: does nucleotide excision repair remove mismatches, does mismatch repair remove damaged bases and do the subunits of the two repair pathways cooperate to create a third repair pathway?

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  1. Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Aziz Sancar

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Sancar, A. Excision repair invades the territory of mismatch repair. Nat Genet 21, 247–249 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/6753

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