HDR through MMEJ (alt-NHEJ)

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R-HSA-5685939
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Homo sapiens
ReviewStatus
5/5
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Homology directed repair (HDR) through microhomology-mediated end joining (MMEJ) is an error prone process also known as alternative nonhomologous end joining (alt-NHEJ), although it does not involve proteins that participate in the classical NHEJ. Contrary to the classical NHEJ and other HDR pathways, homologous recombination repair (HRR) and single strand annealing (SSA), MMEJ does not require ATM activation. In fact, ATM activation inhibits MMEJ. Therefore, MMEJ may be triggered when the amount of DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) overwhelms DNA repair machinery of higher fidelity or when cells are deficient in components of high fidelity DNA repair.

MMEJ is initiated by a limited resection of DNA DSB ends by the MRN complex (MRE11A:RAD50:NBN) and RBBP8 (CtIP), in the absence of CDK2-mediated RBBP8 phosphorylation and related BRCA1:BARD1 recruitment (Yun and Hiom 2009). Single strand DNA (ssDNA) at resected DNA DSB ends recruits PARP1 or PARP2 homo- or heterodimers, together with DNA polymerase theta (POLQ) and FEN1 5'-flap endonuclease. In a poorly studied sequence of events, POLQ promotes the annealing of two 3'-ssDNA overhangs through microhomologous regions that are optimally 10-19 nucleotides long. Using analogy with POLB-mediated long patch base excision repair (BER), it is plausible that PARP1 (or PARP2) dimers coordinate the extension of annealed 3'-ssDNA overhangs via POLQ-mediated strand displacement synthesis with FEN1-mediated cleavage of the resulting 5'-flaps (Liang et al. 2005, Mansour et al. 2011, Sharma et al. 2015, Kent et al. 2015, Ciccaldi et al. 2015, Mateos-Gomez et al. 2015). The MRN complex subsequently recruits DNA ligase 3 (LIG3) bound to XRCC1 (LIG3:XRCC1) to ligate the remaining single strand nicks (SSBs) at MMEJ sites (Della-Maria et al. 2011).

Similar to single strand annealing (SSA), MMEJ leads to deletion of one of the microhomology regions used for annealing and the DNA sequence in between two annealed microhomology regions. MMEJ, just like classical NHEJ, can result in genomic translocations (Ghezraoui et al. 2014). In addition, since POLQ is an error-prone DNA polymerase, MMEJ introduces frequent base substitutions (Ceccaldi et al. 2015).

Literature References
PubMed ID Title Journal Year
25789972 Homology and enzymatic requirements of microhomology-dependent alternative end joining

Srivastava, M, Javadekar, SM, Pandey, M, Sharma, S, Kumari, R, Raghavan, SC

Cell Death Dis 2015
16012167 Modulation of DNA end joining by nuclear proteins

Li, GC, Shao, C, Tischfield, JA, Deng, L, Chen, Y, Liang, L

J. Biol. Chem. 2005
25201414 Chromosomal translocations in human cells are generated by canonical nonhomologous end-joining

Sallmyr, A, Ghezraoui, H, Brunet, E, Jasin, M, Piganeau, M, Ruis, B, Giovannangeli, C, Oh, S, Renaud, JB, Hendrickson, EA, Tomkinson, AE, Renouf, B

Mol. Cell 2014
25643323 Mechanism of microhomology-mediated end-joining promoted by human DNA polymerase ?

McDevitt, SM, Chandramouly, G, Kent, T, Ozdemir, AY, Pomerantz, RT

Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. 2015
21816818 Human Mre11/human Rad50/Nbs1 and DNA ligase IIIalpha/XRCC1 protein complexes act together in an alternative nonhomologous end joining pathway

Tsai, MS, Kuhnlein, J, Zhou, Y, Della-Maria, J, Carney, JP, Tomkinson, AE, Paull, TT

J. Biol. Chem. 2011
25642960 Mammalian polymerase ? promotes alternative NHEJ and suppresses recombination

Lazzerini-Denchi, E, Mateos-Gomez, PA, Miller, KM, Sfeir, A, Nair, N, Gong, F

Nature 2015
19357644 CtIP-BRCA1 modulates the choice of DNA double-strand-break repair pathway throughout the cell cycle

Yun, MH, Hiom, K

Nature 2009
20483915 The alternative end-joining pathway for repair of DNA double-strand breaks requires PARP1 but is not dependent upon microhomologies

Rhein, T, Mansour, WY, Dahm-Daphi, J

Nucleic Acids Res. 2010
25642963 Homologous-recombination-deficient tumours are dependent on Pol?-mediated repair

O'Connor, KW, Liu, JC, Elledge, SJ, Petalcorin, MI, Ceccaldi, R, Boulton, SJ, Yusufzai, T, Hajdu, I, Amunugama, R, D'Andrea, AD, Konstantinopoulos, PA, Primack, B

Nature 2015
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