You mentioned a future experiment of studying HypeC’s involvement with DNA damage due to radiation. How would this experiment look different than your current one?
The experiment would be essentially identical except replacing the cause of DNA damage to be from radiation instead of hydroxyurea. An RT-PCR would still be conducted after and gene expression would be analyzed with treated and untreated conditions.
The process of DNA repair is not delved into in this experiment, but the factors that are involved in it are. What we can say is this: Hydroxyurea induces double stranded breaks. If radiation also induces double stranded breaks, and if HypeC was found to be involved in the DNA damage response pathway for hydroxyurea induced damage, then HypeC could potentially be involved in DNA damage repair due to radiation.
In our case, our primers were simply unable to anneal to HypeC. When we used Primer3Plus and BLAST, two bioinformatic databases, to design our primers, we did not find ones of good enough quality to anneal to HypeC.
Great question! That’s essentially the crux of our whole experiment: finding what factors play a role in T. thermophila’s ability to repair DNA so well. We were only able to look at one such T. thermopila-specific protein, HypeC. Although it was found that HypeC wasn’t involved in repairing DNA damage induced by hydroxyurea, there are other proteins specific to T. thermopila that would have that ability, and testing multiple different proteins specific to T. thermopila is what expands our knowledge of DNA damage repairing proteins. There could be other single-cell eukaryotes or bacteria cells with that ability, but T. thermopile is easily accessible and cost-effective for a lab environment.
curesymposium.org 
You mentioned a future experiment of studying HypeC’s involvement with DNA damage due to radiation. How would this experiment look different than your current one?
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The experiment would be essentially identical except replacing the cause of DNA damage to be from radiation instead of hydroxyurea. An RT-PCR would still be conducted after and gene expression would be analyzed with treated and untreated conditions.
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Does the process of DNA repair differ depending on the type of DNA damage (such as radiation)?
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The process of DNA repair is not delved into in this experiment, but the factors that are involved in it are. What we can say is this: Hydroxyurea induces double stranded breaks. If radiation also induces double stranded breaks, and if HypeC was found to be involved in the DNA damage response pathway for hydroxyurea induced damage, then HypeC could potentially be involved in DNA damage repair due to radiation.
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What do you think caused the primers you created to denature?
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In our case, our primers were simply unable to anneal to HypeC. When we used Primer3Plus and BLAST, two bioinformatic databases, to design our primers, we did not find ones of good enough quality to anneal to HypeC.
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What allows T. thermophila to be better at DNA repair than say another single cell eukaryote or even a bacterial cell?
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Great question! That’s essentially the crux of our whole experiment: finding what factors play a role in T. thermophila’s ability to repair DNA so well. We were only able to look at one such T. thermopila-specific protein, HypeC. Although it was found that HypeC wasn’t involved in repairing DNA damage induced by hydroxyurea, there are other proteins specific to T. thermopila that would have that ability, and testing multiple different proteins specific to T. thermopila is what expands our knowledge of DNA damage repairing proteins. There could be other single-cell eukaryotes or bacteria cells with that ability, but T. thermopile is easily accessible and cost-effective for a lab environment.
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