A new paper entitled “Strand specificity of ribonucleotide excision repair in _Escherichia coli_” was published in Nucleic Acids Research. In this paper the authors demonstrate that in _Escherichia coli_ the repair of ribonucleotides inserted by DNA polymerases during DNA replication and trans-lesion synthesis (TLS) differs between both DNA strands. On the leading DNA strand, ribonucleotides are repaired predominantly by the RNase HII dependent Ribonucleotide Excision Repair (RER) system, while on the lagging strand they are removed using RNase HI dependent RER and the Nucleotide Excision Repair (NER) pathway.
The work, whose first author is Krystian Łazowski and the corresponding co-author is Karolina Makieła-Dzbeńska (Laboratory of DNA Replication and Genome Stability), was supported by the National Science Centre (Preludium grant for KŁ and Harmonia grant for KMD) and was performed in collaboration with Roger Woodgate (NIH, USA) and Anders Clausen (Gothenburg University, Sweden).