Dr. Luay Joudeh, a former research associate of the Pellegrini group who is now a microscopy manager at the departments of Pathology & Biochemistry, together with Robert Appleby, a former PhD student who is now at the Francis Crick Institute, have published a significant Reviewed Preprint in eLife on how an important player in DNA repair – the RAD51 filament – promotes the exchange of strands between DNA molecules that contain homologous (identical or similar) sequences. This research will be extremely valuable to those studying genome stability and DNA repair.
Senior author, Luca Pellegrini, explained: “Our RAD51 D-loop structure provides fundamental insights into the biochemical reaction of eukaryotic homologous recombination. We believe these insights will be useful for those studying DNA repair processes in health and disease, and in designing therapies that can either repair or block these mechanisms in diseases such as cancer.”
The editors of eLife have described the paper as ‘a landmark study with compelling evidence’; read the full review here.