Just as you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found that you can't make long-term memories without DNA damage and brain inflammation. Their surprising findings ...
Mar 27, 2024
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Researchers have developed a blood test that detects Parkinson's disease, potentially establishing a way to help diagnose the condition before nervous system damage worsens.
Aug 30, 2023
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Around half of the genome is made up of transposable elements or 'jumping genes' that derive from ancient viral integrations. They persist in various states of decay like an old fashioned 'pull your own' junkyard where parts ...
Telomerase is a reverse transcriptase that uses an RNA template to synthesize telomeres. These repeat sequences bind special proteins that fold the ends of chromosomes back onto themselves to create a stable cap. When this ...
Much of the damage that ultraviolet radiation (UV) does to skin occurs hours after sun exposure, a team of Yale-led researchers concluded in a study that was published online Feb. 19 by the journal Science.
Feb 19, 2015
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As we age, our cells change and become damaged. Now, researchers at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging have shown that aging is determined not only by the accumulation of changes during ...
Aug 21, 2013
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(Medical Xpress)—Researchers in the U.S. have developed a new method to study damage to DNA and resultant translocations in living cells.
Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have discovered that a certain type of DNA damage long thought to be particularly detrimental to brain cells can actually be part of a regular, non-harmful process. The team further ...
Mar 24, 2013
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We take it for granted that our chromosomes won't stick together, yet this kind of cellular disaster would happen constantly were it not for a protein called TRF2. Now, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) ...
Feb 6, 2013
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For years, researchers have published papers that associate chronic stress with chromosomal damage.
Aug 21, 2011
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DNA repair refers to a collection of processes by which a cell identifies and corrects damage to the DNA molecules that encode its genome. In human cells, both normal metabolic activities and environmental factors such as UV light and Radiation can cause DNA damage, resulting in as many as 1 million individual molecular lesions per cell per day. Many of these lesions cause structural damage to the DNA molecule and can alter or eliminate the cell's ability to transcribe the gene that the affected DNA encodes. Other lesions induce potentially harmful mutations in the cell's genome, which affect the survival of its daughter cells after it undergoes mitosis. Consequently, the DNA repair process is constantly active as it responds to damage in the DNA structure.
The rate of DNA repair is dependent on many factors, including the cell type, the age of the cell, and the extracellular environment. A cell that has accumulated a large amount of DNA damage, or one that no longer effectively repairs damage incurred to its DNA, can enter one of three possible states:
The DNA repair ability of a cell is vital to the integrity of its genome and thus to its normal functioning and that of the organism. Many genes that were initially shown to influence lifespan have turned out to be involved in DNA damage repair and protection. Failure to correct molecular lesions in cells that form gametes can introduce mutations into the genomes of the offspring and thus influence the rate of evolution.
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