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Molecular and Cellular Biology, November 2007, p. 7816-7827, Vol. 27, No. 22
0270-7306/07/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/MCB.00455-07
Copyright © 2007, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Accurate Homologous Recombination Is a Prominent Double-Strand Break Repair Pathway in Mammalian Chromosomes and Is Modulated by Mismatch Repair Protein Msh2

Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208

Received 16 March 2007/ Returned for modification 21 May 2007/ Accepted 27 August 2007

We designed DNA substrates to study intrachromosomal recombination in mammalian chromosomes. Each substrate contains a thymidine kinase (tk) gene fused to a neomycin resistance (neo) gene. The fusion gene is disrupted by an oligonucleotide containing the 18-bp recognition site for endonuclease I-SceI. Substrates also contain a "donor" tk sequence that displays 1% or 19% sequence divergence relative to the tk portion of the fusion gene. Each donor serves as a potential recombination partner for the fusion gene. After stably transfecting substrates into mammalian cell lines, we investigated spontaneous recombination and double-strand break (DSB)-induced recombination following I-SceI expression. No recombination events between sequences with 19% divergence were recovered. Strikingly, even though no selection for accurate repair was imposed, accurate conservative homologous recombination was the predominant DSB repair event recovered from rodent and human cell lines transfected with the substrate containing sequences displaying 1% divergence. Our work is the first unequivocal demonstration that homologous recombination can serve as a major DSB repair pathway in mammalian chromosomes. We also found that Msh2 can modulate homologous recombination in that Msh2 deficiency promoted discontinuity and increased length of gene conversion tracts and brought about a severalfold increase in the overall frequency of DSB-induced recombination.

Published ahead of print on 10 September 2007.

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