Does Arabidopsis have translesion syntheses ?

Nakagawa, Mayu; Sakamoto, Ayako; Takahashi, Shinya*; Tanaka, Atsushi; Narumi, Issei

Plants are exposed to the various environmental stress including UV-B and chemical agents, which damage DNA. To tolerate to the DNA damage, plants have developed many mechanisms to repair or to avoid them. Yeast and mammals have a mechanism named translesion synthesis (TLS), in which DNA damage is bypassed by the action of specific DNA polymerases, thereby allowing DNA replication to be completed. However, TLS often generates mutations as a result of incorrect replication (error-prone TLS). We identified and genes, which are the homologs of components of error-prone TLS in Arabidopsis. To determine whether and function as the component of the error-prone TLS, We further analyzed the UV-induced mutation frequency in and mutants. We found that the disruption of or reduced the mutation frequency to 1/4 of the level of the wild type, indicating that and act in the error-prone TLS in Arabidopsis.