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Moving forward one step back at a time: reversibility during homologous recombination

Aurèle Piazza and Wolf-Dietrich Heyer (2019)

Current genetics, 65(6):1333–1340.

DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) are genotoxic lesions whose repair can be templated off an intact DNA duplex through the conserved Homologous Recombination (HR) pathway. Because it mainly consists of a succession of non-covalent associations of molecules, HR is intrinsically reversible. Reversibility serves as an integral property of HR, exploited and tuned at various stages throughout the pathway with anti- and pro-recombinogenic consequences. Here, we focus on the reversibility of displacement loops (D-loops), a central DNA joint molecule intermediate whose dynamics and regulations has recently been physically probed in somatic S. cerevisiae cells. From homology search to repair completion, we discuss putative roles of D-loop reversibility in repair fidelity and outcome.