Chinese hamster ovary mutant UV-1 is hypomutable and defective in a postreplication recovery process.

CHO-UV-1 is a mutant of the Chinese hamster cell CHO-K1 hypersensitive to killing by ultraviolet light but with normal resistance to X-ray. It is also hypersensitive to killing by ethyl methane sulfonate. Hybrid clones formed bu fusing UV-1 and Chinese hamster lung cells display the normal ultraviolet resistance of the latter. The sensitive phenotype behaves, therefore, in a genetically recessive manner. Ultraviolet sensitivity of UV-1 is not associated with a deficiency in excision repair. Alkaline sucrose gradient sedimentation analysis of nascent DNA from ultraviolet-irradiated cells reveals that UV-1 is, however, markedly deficient in postreplication recovery. Furthermore, UV-1 has a lower rate of induced mutation to 6-thioguanine resistance than does the parental cell when treated with ultraviolet light or ethyl methane sulfonate. These results suggest that the phenotype of UV-1 is due to a mutation in a form of postreplication recovery which in normal cells is error prone.