This year, we provided the first comparison, to our knowledge, of the efficiency of MMR of leading and lagging strand replication errors. We first use the strand-biased ribonucleotide incorporation propensity of a Pol mutator variant to confirm that Pol is the primary leading strand replicase in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We then use polymerase-specific error signatures to show that MMR efficiency in vivo strongly depends on the polymerase, the mismatch composition and the location of the mismatch. An extreme case of variation by location is a T-T mismatch that is refractory to MMR. This mismatch is flanked by an AT-rich triplet repeat sequence that, when interrupted, restores MMR to >95% efficiency. Thus this natural DNA sequence suppresses MMR, placing a nearby base pair at high risk of mutation due to leading strand replication infidelity. We find that overall, MMR most efficiently corrects the most potentially deleterious errors (indels) and then the most common substitution mismatches. In combination with earlier studies, the results indicate that significant differences exist in the generation and repair of Pol , and replication errors, but in a generally complementary manner that results in high fidelity replication of both DNA strands of the yeast nuclear genome.
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