Relationships Among Repair, Mutagenesis, and Survival: Overview

Abstract

In genetically damaged cells, the pathways of survival, mutagenesis, and repair are inseparable. An irradiated or chemically treated cell, having sustained potentially lethal damage to its DNA, may or may not survive. Surviving, it may or may not have kept intact its store of genetic information. The fate of such a cell depends in part upon the nature and degree of primary DNA damage, in part upon the DNA repair systems available to the cell which are capable of neutralizing the damage, and to an important extent also upon the internal and external environmental factors which determine how effectively repair mechanisms can operate. A surviving cell may have undergone a mutation either because an unrepaired DNA lesion has generated a replication error or because an error-prone repair system has changed the base sequence in the course of restoring a viable DNA structure (see Witkin, 1969; Bridges, 1969; Kondo, 1973; Doudney, 1974).