Molecular movie captures DNA repair from start to finish

An international team of researchers has used time-resolved ultrafast crystallography to follow the progress of DNA repair by a photolyase enzyme. The work is ‘the first structural characterisation of a full enzyme reaction cycle,’ says Manuel Maestre-Reyna, who led the research.

While many of the stages of this process have been studied before, the new research goes significantly further ‘by visualising the choreography of both substrate and the enzyme,’ says molecular biologist Aziz Sancar of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on mechanistic studies of DNA repair. In particular, the study has overcome the challenge of capturing events that occur at vastly different timescales to map every enzymatic step of the process. Sancar calls it ‘outstanding work, pushing the limits of time-resolved crystallography’.