This year, partly in collaboration with other laboratories, our group published eight scientific articles related to DNA replication fidelity. We showed that incorporation of ribonucleotides during eukaryotic nuclear DNA replication results in large forms of chromosomal instability in budding yeast, loss-of-heterozygosity and nonallelic homologous recombination. Both forms of instability are largely, if not exclusively, due to topoisomerase 1 incision of ribonucleotides incorporated by DNA polymerase epsilon, the primarily leading strand replicase. We showed that DNA polymerase elta, which primarily replicates the lagging strand of DNA during normal DNA replication, replicates both DNA strands after homologous recombination-dependent fork restart at a well-defined replication fork barrier in fission yeast. We showed that a dNTP pool imbalance in budding yeast that is driven by a mutation in ribonucleotide reductase reduces the fidelity of DNA replication in a manner consistent with the pool imbalance. We published three articles that reviewed recent work on replication fidelity and its implications for evolution and the origins of human diseases. We published an article highlighting our method to monitor ribonucleotide incorporation across the whole budding yeast genome, and awe published an article discussing our preferred model of eukaryotic nuclear DNA replication enzymology in relation to an alternative viewpoint published by another laboratory.

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26
Fiscal Year
2016
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U.S. National Inst of Environ Hlth Scis
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Zhou, Zhi-Xiong; Williams, Jessica S; Kunkel, Thomas A (2018) Studying Ribonucleotide Incorporation: Strand-specific Detection of Ribonucleotides in the Yeast Genome and Measuring Ribonucleotide-induced Mutagenesis. J Vis Exp :
Kunkel, Thomas A (2018) A simple but profound mutation in mouse DNA polymerase ? drives tumorigenesis. J Clin Invest :
Williams, Jessica S; Kunkel, Thomas A (2018) Studying Topoisomerase 1-Mediated Damage at Genomic Ribonucleotides. Methods Mol Biol 1703:241-257
Kaminski, Andrea M; Tumbale, Percy P; Schellenberg, Matthew J et al. (2018) Structures of DNA-bound human ligase IV catalytic core reveal insights into substrate binding and catalysis. Nat Commun 9:2642
Huang, Shar-Yin N; Williams, Jessica S; Arana, Mercedes E et al. (2017) Topoisomerase I-mediated cleavage at unrepaired ribonucleotides generates DNA double-strand breaks. EMBO J 36:361-373
Kunkel, Thomas A; Burgers, Peter M J (2017) Arranging eukaryotic nuclear DNA polymerases for replication: Specific interactions with accessory proteins arrange Pols ?, ?, and ? in the replisome for leading-strand and lagging-strand DNA replication. Bioessays 39:
Williams, Jessica S; Gehle, Daniel B; Kunkel, Thomas A (2017) The role of RNase H2 in processing ribonucleotides incorporated during DNA replication. DNA Repair (Amst) 53:52-58
Jamsen, Joonas A; Beard, William A; Pedersen, Lars C et al. (2017) Time-lapse crystallography snapshots of a double-strand break repair polymerase in action. Nat Commun 8:253
Burgers, Peter M J; Kunkel, Thomas A (2017) Eukaryotic DNA Replication Fork. Annu Rev Biochem 86:417-438
Burgers, Peter M J; Gordenin, Dmitry; Kunkel, Thomas A (2016) Who Is Leading the Replication Fork, Pol ? or Pol ?? Mol Cell 61:492-493

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