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What Happens When Your DNA Is Damaged?
What Happens When Your DNA Is Damaged?
Introduction
The DNA in just one of your cells gets damaged tens of thousands of times per
day.
Multiply that by your body's hundred trillion or so cells, and you've got a quintillion
DNA errors everyday.
And because DNA provides the blueprint for the proteins your cells need to
function, damage causes serious problems, such as cancer.
Fortunately, your cells have ways of fixing most of these problems. Most of the
time, these repair pathways all rely on specialized enzymes.
Main point 1
Different ones respond to different types of damage.
Each nucleotide contains a base, and during DNA replication, the enzyme DNA
polymerase is supposed to bring in the right partner to pair with every base on
each template strand.
The enzyme catches most of these right away, and cuts off a few nucleotides
and replaces them with the correct ones.
And just in case it missed a few, a second set of proteins comes behind it to
check.
If they find a mismatch, they cut out the incorrect nucleotide and replace it.
This is called mismatch repair.
Together, these two systems reduce the number of base mismatch errors
and other enzymes come in to trim around the site and replace the nucleotides.
The two most common pathways for repairing double strand breaks