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Microfluidic platform for study of molecular mechanism involved in human DNA reparation

23 September 2016

Molecular machines for DNA repair: the DNAREPAIRMAN project

Twelve European organizations from academia, coming from Netherland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Poland will constitute a training and research network to study DNA repair. The main idea behind the DNAREPAIRMAN project is to understand critical reparation pathways in human DNA.

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Understanding the DNA repair pathways

In our body, we can count 1 million molecular lesions per cell each day. These lesions lead to DNA damage which can cause unregulated cell division and consequently tumors. DNA repair is constantly active to fight the damage, and a deeply mechanistic understanding of its pathways is now fundamental. Indeed, the DNA repair ability of our cells is vital to the integrity of its genome.

The relevance of this question has been recognized thanks to the 2015 Nobel Chemistry Prize, granted to three researchers focusing on DNA repair. Thus, the main goal of the DNAREPAIRMAN project is to perpetuate the virtuous cycle between new technologies, new questions and new insights.

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The DNAREPAIRMAN project goals

The DNAREPAIRMAN projet gathers scientists from three areas of research: biologists, chemists, and physicists, to answer a fundamental research question: what are the statistical properties and molecular mechanisms of the switches and motors involved in two critical DNA repair pathways?

Thus, the objectives of this consortium will be to characterize the mechanism of lesion formation, to determine the structure of the helicase recruitment complexes, to characterize the catalytic properties of the unwinding complexes, to understand the regulation of their activity and to establish the link between DNA repair and replication. To adress this challenge, the company Elvesys will develop a microfluidic platform which will be implemented at LMB and CNRS to multiplex single molecule light microscopy experiments.