Direct measurement of DNA repair is crucial for explaining its clinical relevance and discovering drugs for cancer treatment. In view of this, Jiang Jianhui and other researchers from Hunan University reported that DNA repair and activation enzymes can monitor DNA alkylation repair in living cells.

Key points of this paper

1) The researchers report a repair and activation DNase (radioenzyme) that incorporates a single methylated lesion (o6meg, 3mec, or 1mea) at a designated site through systematic screening.

2) The researchers found that the catalytic activity of the radioactive enzyme was significantly inhibited and could be restored by enzyme mediated DNA repair. Based on this finding, researchers developed a fluorescent radioenzyme sensor for monitoring MGMT mediated o6meg damage repair.

3) The sensor can be used to evaluate the repair activity of MGMT under different cell and drug treatments. In addition, another radzyme sensor is designed to monitor alkbh2 mediated 3mec damage repair.

This work provides a simple and universal tool for basic biological research, clinical diagnosis and treatment evaluation of DNA repair.