Sunlight tagged posts

Highlights
•Mutation clusters in cancer genomes provide fingerprints of mutagenic mechanisms
•Error-free mismatch repair lowers the mutation rate in H3K36me3-marked active genes
•Error-prone repair using POLH also targets H3K36me3, contributing driver mutations
•UV and alcohol increase error-prone repair, targeting mutations toward active genes

Sunlight, alcohol consumption increase the rate at which this happens, resulting in more mutations in the most important parts of our genomes. Cancer is mostly caused by changes in the DNA of our cells that occur during our lifetime rather than those that we inherit from our parents. Identifying the causes of these ‘mutations’ is a difficult challenge because many processes can result in an identical DNA sequence change in a genome...