Revealing the Superpowers of PrimPol: rescuing replicating microsatellites

摘要

R‐loops are potentially mutagenic three‐stranded structures where has hybridized to one strand of and displaced the other, exposing ss . Long repeated R‐loop‐forming sequences are known to cause genomic instability and are associated with disease. Šviković ( ) show that even short tandem (microsatellite) repeats, abundant in the vertebrate genome, do form R‐loops and present a barrier to replication. However, the replication fork can move past these short R‐loop‐forming repeats through the re‐priming action of primase–polymerase (PrimPol), thus avoiding the loss of epigenetic information or damage.