DNA DAMAGE SIGNALING AND DNA REPAIR

Authors：Junjie Chen Department of Experimental Radiation Oncology; The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; Holcombe Boulevard; Houston; Texas; USA

Source：2010 International Conference on Biomedical and Environmental Sciences & Technology: DNA Repair and Cancer Intervention (icBEST-2010) , China,Heilongjiang,Suihua,Beilin, 2010-05-09.

DNA–DNA hybridization (DDH) techniques have been used as the gold standard for the genomic similarity analyses of pair-wise sets of strains for classification purposes. The method has had an enormous relevance during the last half a century of classification of prokaryotes. Several different approaches have been developed to evaluate the degree of relatedness of two genomes and are mainly based on either measuring the degree of hybrid reassociation or the thermal stability of the hybrids. DDH has been often criticized as cumbersome and inaccurate, and for the inability to produce cumulative databases. For these reasons, and in light of the current developments of genome sequencing, DDH methods are called to be substituted by alternative approaches based on genome-to-genome sequence comparisons. However, until sequencing costs are reduced, DDH is still the method of choice to genomically circumscribe species. Here three different approaches are presented in detail to facilitate the establishment of these techniques in microbial systematics laboratories.