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Review
. 2004 Aug-Sep;3(8-9):817-26.
doi: 10.1016/j.dnarep.2004.03.015.

The mechanism of vertebrate nonhomologous DNA end joining and its role in V(D)J recombination

Michael R Lieber  1 , Yunmei Ma, Ulrich Pannicke, Klaus Schwarz
Affiliations
Review

The mechanism of vertebrate nonhomologous DNA end joining and its role in V(D)J recombination

Michael R Lieber et al. DNA Repair (Amst). 2004 Aug-Sep.

Abstract

The vertebrate immune system generates double-strand DNA (dsDNA) breaks to generate the antigen receptor repertoire of lymphocytes. After those double-strand breaks have been created, the DNA joinings required to complete the process are carried out by the nonhomologous DNA end joining pathway, or NHEJ. The NHEJ pathway is present not only in lymphocytes, but in all eukaryotic cells ranging from yeast to humans. The NHEJ pathway is needed to repair these physiologic breaks, as well as challenging pathologic breaks that arise from ionizing radiation and oxidative damage to DNA.

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