Nucleotide Excision Repair - Lighting up a Dark Pathway

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Nucleotide Excision Repair (NER), also known as "Dark Repair", is a DNA repair pathway essential for all forms of life including humans. Mutations in this pathway lead to devastating diseases such as xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) and trichothiodystrophy (TTD) with elevated cancer levels and premature ageing. NER is highly complex, involves many different proteins, and is still not well understood. There are particular hurdles in the study of dynamic processes such as NER that involve transient interactions of large protein and DNA complexes. Advances in protein production and in new techniques to study molecules one at a time (thus avoiding averaging effects) have opened the door to new ways to study and understand these complex processes, and we now have all the tools we need to study NER in detail. By "lighting up" individual protein complexes we can follow their behavior in real time, and their interactions with other DNA and protein species. Recent advances in structural biology techniques will allow these large protein complexes to be studied at a molecular level. This work will advance technology and lead to a step change in our fundamental knowledge of a key aspect of our biology, essential for healthy ageing.