The relevance of bacterial mutators to understanding human cancer.

The study of mutator strains of bacteria has elucidated new systems and pathways of mutagenesis and led to the defining of human counterparts to these systems. In addition to previous work that defined the mismatch repair system, newer studies have revealed a repair pathway for oxidative lesions, as well as demonstrating that mistranslation can increase mutation rates. Defects in the human repair pathways are involved in increased cancer susceptibility as well as a mutator character.