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| | ScienceDaily: Clearing Jams In Copy Machinery |
 | | New research published this week in MolecularCell from the laboratory of Rockefeller University's Michael O'Donnell,a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, now shows that one ofthese proteins, the beta sliding clamp, serves as a toolbelt from whichthe correct proteins are retrieved to enable DNA replication in theface of DNA damage. |
 | | As thering-shaped beta sliding clamp works its way along the DNA doublehelix, a network of proteins work together to unwind the two strands.Polymerases then add, in assembly line fashion, nucleotide bases -- thebuilding blocks that make up DNA -- to convert the now-single-strandedtemplates into two new duplex DNA molecules. |
 | | "Onepossibility is that the beta clamp may sense when Pol III stalls,triggering a change in beta that pulls the polymerase from the primedsite, allowing Pol IV to take over synthesis," O'Donnell says. |
| www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2005/09/050920082649.htm (1700 words) |
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