Direct observation of damage clustering in irradiated DNA with atomic force microscopy

Paper summary

DNA carries the genetic information inside the cells and represents a sensitive target of ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiations induce free radicals in DNA constituents and thereby produce various types of DNA lesions such as base damage, DNA single-strand breaks (SSBs), DNA doublestrand breaks (DSBs), and DNA-protein crosslinks Ionizing radiation produces clustered DNA damage that contains two or more lesions in 10–20 bp. It is believed that the complexity of clustered damage (i.e., the number of lesions per damage site) is related to the biological severity of ionizing radiation. However, only simple clustered damage containing two vicinal lesions has been demonstrated experimentally. Here we developed a novel method to analyze the complexity of clustered DNA damage by AFM.

Journal : Nucleic Acids Research

Publiosh Date : 16 December 2019

Paper link

Direct observation of damage clustering in irradiated DNA with atomic force microscopy