Biochemistry Commons^™

Characterizing The Interaction Of Polymerase Θ Helicase-Like Domain With Dna, Scott Vanson

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

DNA damaging events occur every day in every cell of all living organisms andsome may result in double-stranded breaks (DSB). Human DNA polymerase θ (Pol θ) is a large, 290 kDa DNA repair enzyme and is the only known protein to contain both a polymerase domain and a helicase-like domain (HLD) as one molecule. Pol θ is the key mediator of the error-prone DSB repair pathway, Theta-mediated End Joining. This enzyme has been identified as a potential therapeutic target as it may be conferring a survival advantage to subsets of homologous recombination (HR)-deficient cancers, which display elevated expression levels of …