On 14 Aug 2017 John Hearns <hear...@googlemail.com> wrote:
I would be a bit more concerned about radiation doses to the personnel!
This is well studied of course, and I believe DNA has its own ECC
codes.
There are mechanisms for repairing DNA but none are very similar to the
way ECC works. The closest to that I think are the modes of single
strand repair which remove damaged bases on one side and then replace
them with the base(s) complementary to the undamaged one(s) on the other
strand. Those use "extra information" to repair an error, but there is
no checksum, or anything remotely similar, just enzymes that recognize
damaged DNA bases and act on them.
Deinococcus radiodurans apparently takes this sort of repair a step
farther. By keeping two copies of its genome (which is unusual in
little beasties like this) it can repair one copy with sequence from the
other. We also have two copies of our genomes (not quite identical, one
from each parent) but we don't have the same repair mechanism, as far as
I know, and so we are not nearly as resistant to radiation as that
organism.
Regards,
David Mathog
mat...@caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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