New Scientist
Image: Vassilis Roukos
They could be the most dangerous liaisons ever caught on camera. Time-lapse microscopy has captured severed DNA strands in the act of pairing up with partners from the wrong chromosomes – a process with links to cancer.
Our cells have repair systems in place to make sure that any genetic damage is quickly fixed. But these repairs can go wrong, splicing together broken DNA strands from different chromosomes. These mix-ups – known as chromosome translocations – can lead to harmful mutations and are a hallmark of cancer cells.
What isn’t clear is exactly how and why the translocations occur in the first place. Tom Misteli at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues decided to take a closer look. They engineered the DNA in mouse cells so that it would split apart when exposed to a yeast enzyme, and they then watched the cells repair themselves. Read more on newscientist.com…
