The BRCA Tumor Suppressor Network in Chromosome Damage Repair by Homologous Recombination.

ABSTRACT: Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes predispose afflicted individuals to breast, ovarian, and other cancers. The BRCA-encoded products form complexes with other tumor suppressor proteins and with the recombinase enzyme RAD51 to mediate chromosome damage repair by homologous recombination and also to protect stressed DNA replication forks against spurious nucleolytic attrition. Understanding how the BRCA tumor suppressor network executes its biological functions would provide the foundation for developing targeted cancer therapeutics, but progress in this area has been greatly hampered by the challenge of obtaining purified BRCA complexes for mechanistic studies. In this article, we review how recent effort begins to overcome this technical challenge, leading to functional and structural

SUBMITTER: Zhao W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7004434 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature