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Zinc Finger Dna Repair Protein Targets Of Arsenite In The Nucleotide Excision Repair Pathway, Juliana M. Huestis

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Environmental arsenic exposure affects around 100 million people worldwide. Recent evidence shows that arsenite, even at low concentrations, may act as a co-carcinogen, by displacing zinc from the zinc finger motifs of certain DNA repair proteins, leaving them vulnerable to redox modification and loss of protein function. This study probes the physical chemistry underlying arsenite and zinc binding to XPA and PARP1, in the hope of illuminating some of the aspects of protein structure that determine susceptibility to arsenite binding. In this study, dissociation constants are determined for zinc and arsenite binding to peptides corresponding to the C4 zinc finger …