An oxidative damage-specific endonuclease from rat liver mitochondria.

Reactive oxygen species have been shown to generate mutagenic lesions in DNA. One of the most abundant lesions in both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA is 7,8-dihydro-8-oxoguanine (8-oxoG). We report here the partial purification and characterization of a mitochondrial oxidative damage endonuclease (mtODE) from rat liver that recognizes and incises at 8-oxoG and abasic sites in duplex DNA. Rat liver mitochondria were purified by differential and Percoll gradient centrifugation, and mtODE was extracted from Triton X-100-solubilized mitochondria. Incision activity was measured using a radiolabeled double-stranded DNA oligonucleotide containing a unique 8-oxoG, and reaction products were separated by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Gel filtration chromatography predicts mtODE's molecular mass to be between 25 and 30 kDa. mtODE has a monovalent cation optimum between 50 and 100 mM KCl and a pH optimum between 7.5 and 8. mtODE does not require any co-factors and is active in the presence of 5 mM EDTA. It is specific for 8-oxoG and preferentially incises at 8-oxoG:C base pairs. mtODE is a putative 8-oxoG glycosylase/lyase enzyme, because it can be covalently linked to the 8-oxoG oligonucleotide by sodium borohydride reduction. Comparison of mtODE's activity with other known 8-oxoG glycosylases/lyases and mitochondrial enzymes reveals that this may be a novel protein.

Mammalian DNA repair responses and genomic instability.

A cell responds to damage to its DNA in one of three ways: by tolerating the damage, by repairing the damage or by undergoing apoptosis. The latter two responses represent defenses against genomic instability and tumorigenesis resulting from unrepaired damage. There are multiple DNA repair pathways to cope with a variety of damage reflecting the importance of DNA repair in maintaining both cell viability and genomic stability. These include base excision repair, mismatch repair, double-strand break repair and nucleotide excision repair. Several signal transduction pathways are activated by DNA damage resulting in cell-cycle arrest. Cell-cycle arrest increases the time available for DNA repair before DNA replication and mutation fixation. Recently, there has been tremendous progress in our understanding of the molecular components repair processes and to examine recently observed interactions between DNA repair, signal transduction pathways and other cellular processes such as cell-cycle control, transcription, replication and recombination.

Induction of GADD153, a CCAAT/enhancer-binding protein (C/EBP)-related gene, during the acute phase response in rats. Evidence for the involvement of C/EBPs in regulating its expression.

CCAAT/enhancer-binding proteins (C/EBPs) comprise a homologous group of transcriptional regulators that control liver and fat differentiation and are involved in regulating the expression of acute phase reactants during the host response to inflammation. GADD153, a unique member of the C/EBP family, has been proposed to act as a dominant negative inhibitor of other C/EBPs, but little is known about its expression in liver or its role in the processes described above. We have examined its expression during the acute phase response (APR) and have shown that like C/EBP beta and C/EBP delta, GADD153 mRNA is markedly induced in livers of rats treated with lipopolysaccharide to initiate the APR. Interestingly, its induction is temporally delayed relative to that of C/EBP beta and C/EBP delta but is similar to that of acute phase reactants shown to be regulated by C/EBPs. Footprint analysis of the GADD153 promoter showed binding of proteins in liver extracts of both untreated and lipopolysaccharide-injected rats to a putative C/EBP regulatory site. Gel shift analysis showed that although present constitutively, binding activity was increased in extracts from lipopolysaccharide-treated animals. Both C/EBP alpha and C/EBP beta were shown to contribute to the binding activity with the contribution by C/EBP beta increasing during the APR. Support for the functional role of this C/EBP-binding site and its interaction with C/EBPs in regulating GADD153 expression was obtained with cultured HepG2 hepatoma cells in which overexpression of C/EBP beta was found to transactivate expression of a plasmid containing the GADD153 promoter linked to a reporter gene. These findings suggest that the GADD153 gene is itself regulated by C/EBPs during the host response to inflammation and that GADD153 is likely to contribute to the regulation of other genes whose expression is altered during the APR.