Involvement of Escherichia coli mismatch repair in DNA replication and recombination.

Abstract

The idea that there might be a process capable of recognizing and repairing incorrect base pairs in double-stranded DNA (mismatch repair) was originally proposed to account for results obtained from the study of genetic recombination. In particular, it was suggested that the repair of mismatched bases in heteroduplex regions of DNA (i.e., regions formed by strand exchange between DNA molecules with similar but not identical sequences) could be involved in gene conversion (Holliday 1964) and could account for the phenomenon of high negative interference (White and Fox 1974). That mismatch repair in E. coli might be involved in correcting replication errors was suggested by the finding that mutants deficient in mismatch repair have a mutator phenotype (Nevers and Spatz 1975; Rydberg 1978; Glickman and Radman 1980). Perhaps to a large extent because of its apparent involvement in mutation avoidance, mismatch repair has recently been widely studied. We will describe here...