Quantum Times

Researchers discover how key enzyme repairs sun-damaged DNA

Researchers have long known that humans lack a key enzyme -- one possessed by most of the animal kingdom and even plants -- that reverses severe sun damage.For the first time, researchers have witnessed how this enzyme works at the atomic level to repair sun-damaged DNA.The discovery holds promise for future sunburn remedies and skin cancer prevention.In the early online edition of the journal Nature, Ohio State University physicist and chemist Dongping Zhong and his colleagues describe how they were able to observe the enzyme, called photolyase, inject a single electron and proton into an injured strand of DNA. The two subatomic particles healed the damage in a few billionths of a second."It sounds simple, but those two atomic particles actually initiated a very complex series of chemical reactions," said Zhong, the Robert Smith Associate Professor of Physics, and associate professor in the departments of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State. "It all happened very fast, and the timing had

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