What Is Dna Damage

DNA damage is a change in the basic structure of DNA that is not itself replicated when the DNA is replicated. A DNA damage can be a chemical addition or disruption to a base of DNA (creating an abnormal nucleotide or nucleotide fragment) or a break in one or both chains of the DNA strands.

What is DNA damage and DNA repair?

At least five major DNA repair pathways—base excision repair (BER), nucleotide excision repair (NER), mismatch repair (MMR), homologous recombination (HR) and non-homologous end joining (NHEJ)—are active throughout different stages of the cell cycle, allowing the cells to repair the DNA damage.

How do you treat damaged DNA?

Use of NHEJ-Mediated Repair for Therapy. In mammalian cells, NHEJ is the most commonly used pathway to repair a DSB. This mechanism is generally fast and promotes the ligation of the broken DNA without loss of genetic information in less than an hour [114].