Rising from the Ashes: DNA Repair in Deinococcus radiodurans

single-stranded DNA in ESDSA requires the function of at least one nuclease and helicase and perhaps several of both. Proteins are also needed to load RecA protein onto single-strand DNA binding protein (SSB)-coated single-stranded DNA. The most important pathway for double-strand break repair in Escherichia coli utilizes the RecBCD enzyme for all of these roles. However, Deinococcus encodes no homologue of RecB or RecC. Deinococcus does encode homologues of every protein involved in what is considered (in E. coli) an auxiliary pathway for recombinational DNA repair—the RecFOR pathway. In the RecFOR pathway, the RecJ and RecQ proteins take up the nuclease and helicase roles, respectively, while the RecFOR proteins function to load RecA