哺乳动物细胞DNA修复研究中的几个重要进展

SOME IMPORTANT ADVANCES IN DNA REPAIR STUDY ON THE MAMMALIAN CELLS

In the recent years the study of DNA damage and repair in themammalian cells has gone deeply at gene level and got the following advances: (1)For a long time DNA has been considered to be an uniform unit in case of damageand repair. Now this concept should be replaced by the non-random distribution ofdamage and heterogenous repair in the genome. These would allow us to study cellu-lar mutagensis, carcinogenesis. aging and dying processes in great detail, and would bebeneficial to the elucidation of mechanisms of radiation sickness and chemical toxico-logy. (2) The advent of new techniques in molecular biology has made it possible toisolate and clone the human DNA repair genes. Up to now more than ten humanDNA repair genes have been cloned and these works would have an important impacton the theoretical and practical study in this field. Because DNA repair system is verycomplicate. voluminous work should be done in the future. (3) The technique of genetransfer has been efficiently used in the study of DNA repair in mammalian cells andhas made great contribution in the cellular engineering. It could modify the geneticbehavior of the gene-accepting cells. and enhance the DNA repair ability to physicaland chemical damages. Human gene therapy for DNA deficient diseases is now on theday.