Evidence for three types of x-ray damage repair in yeast and sensitivity of totally repair deficient strains to sunlight

Mutants of yeast that confer sensitivity to x-rays are known to fall into two epistasis groups, called here the RAD51 and RAD18 groups, which are each thought to control a different type of x-ray repair. They examine here the role of genes in a third repair pathways in x-ray repair. RAD1 and RAD3 are known to be important in the repair of pyrimidine dimers after uv-irradiation. They find that these genes can also play an important role in x-ray repair, but that this role is only exposed when both the other pathways of x-ray repair are blocked. Double mutants blocked in the RAD51 and RAD18 pathways are significantly less x-ray sensitive than triple mutants blocked in these pathways but also mutant in either the RAD1 or RAD3 genes. In a related experiment, they tested the importance of DNA repair in nature by determining the sensitivity to natural unfiltered sunlight of a strain lacking all known DNA repair pathways. They constructed a quadruple mutant strain containing RAD1-1, RAD18-2, RAD51-1 and PHR1-1. The latter mutation blocks the cell's ability to photoreactivate uv damage. They found that this strain was so sensitive to sunlight that less than three seconds' exposure would cause an average of one lethal hit per cell, and survival was less than 2% after ten seconds' exposure. Wild type yeast at sea level showed no killing after thirty minutes. the quadruple mutant is approximately one thousand times more sensitive to sunlight than the related wild type