A deoxyribozyme that harnesses light to repair thymine dimers in DNA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In vitro selection was used to investigate whether nucleic acid enzymes are capable of catalyzing photochemical reactions. The reaction chosen was photoreactivation of thymine cyclobutane dimers in DNA by using serotonin as cofactor and light of wavelengths longer than the absorption spectrum of DNA. Curiously, the dominant single-stranded DNA sequence selected, UV1A, was found to repair its internal thymine dimer substrate efficiently even in the absence of serotonin or any other cofactor. UV1C, a 42-nucleotide fragment of UV1A, repaired the thymine dimer substrate in trans (k(cat)/k(uncat) = 2.5 x 10(4)), showing optimal activity with 305 nm light and thus resembling naturally occurring photolyase enzymes. Mechanistic investigation of UV1C indicated that its catalytic role likely exceeded the mere positioning of the substrate in a conformation favorable for photoreactivation. A higher-order structure, likely a quadruplex, formed by specific guanine bases within the deoxyribozyme, was implicated as serving as a light-harvesting antenna, with photoreactivation of the thymine dimer proceeding possibly via electron donation from an excited guanine base. In a primordial "RNA world," self-replicating nucleic acid populations may have been vulnerable to deactivation via UV light-mediated pyrimidine dimer formation. Photolyase nucleic acid enzymes such as the one described here could thus have played a role in preserving the integrity of such an RNA world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".