A Mayo Clinic-led research collaboration has discovered that the protein MDC1 amplifies weak DNA injury signals so genetic repair can begin. Once amplified, even low-level damage signals become strong enough to activate the cell’s natural repair processes while the injury is most tractable to repair. How this “distress call” was communicated wasn’t clear until this finding, which appears in the January 20 issue of Molecular Cell (http://www.molecule.org/). The research was conducted in collaboration with colleagues from Harvard University and the University of Texas, Austin.
