Molecular and Computational Biology Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
Genes (Basel). 2022 Mar 17;13(3):529. doi: 10.3390/genes13030529.
Pericentromeric heterochromatin is mostly composed of repetitive DNA sequences prone to aberrant recombination. Cells have developed highly specialized mechanisms to enable 'safe' homologous recombination (HR) repair while preventing aberrant recombination in this domain. Understanding heterochromatin repair responses is essential to understanding the critical mechanisms responsible for genome integrity and tumor suppression. Here, we review the tools, approaches, and methods currently available to investigate double-strand break (DSB) repair in pericentromeric regions, and also suggest how technologies recently developed for euchromatin repair studies can be adapted to characterize responses in heterochromatin. With this ever-growing toolkit, we are witnessing exciting progress in our understanding of how the 'dark matter' of the genome is repaired, greatly improving our understanding of genome stability mechanisms.
着丝粒异染色质主要由易发生异常重组的重复 DNA 序列组成。细胞已经开发出高度特化的机制，以使“安全”的同源重组（HR）修复成为可能，同时防止该区域的异常重组。了解异染色质修复反应对于理解负责基因组完整性和肿瘤抑制的关键机制至关重要。在这里，我们回顾了目前可用于研究着丝粒区域双链断裂（DSB）修复的工具、方法和方法，并提出了如何将最近为常染色质修复研究开发的技术进行调整以描述异染色质中的反应。随着这个不断发展的工具包，我们正在见证我们对基因组“暗物质”如何修复的理解取得令人兴奋的进展，这极大地提高了我们对基因组稳定性机制的理解。
