RecA protein

[travisjbamford]

I recently did an experiment involving UV irradiation of E. coli with a RecA deficient gene. This was to avoid plasmid recombination (the experiment involved transformation, selective growth media, that sort of thing, but is irrelevant to my question) but a little searching online found that it is also a major factor in SoS response (this is the first time I’ve heard of this system, so my knowledge of it is very limited).

My question ultimately is: would a RecA deficient bacterium be unable to repair its DNA, or have reduced DNA repair?

As a side note; I haven’t found much evidence that there is significant damage to other parts of the cell (membrane, proteins etc.) from uv exposure, most articles I’ve seen focus on DNA damage. Would it be correct to assume that most apoptosis is a result of DNA damage?

edit: This is relative to a second year university biology course

[JackBean]

In diploid organisms that will definitivelly lead to increased sensitivity to UV. In bacteria I’m not much sure, what template could it use for recombination. Maybe duplicated chromosome before division?

I think, that even if the other parts got damaged, it is not so serious, because they can be replaced with new one (and they are, all the time, no matter of UV irradiation;), but DNA is only one and keeps the info for building the whole cell, so if there gets something wrong… 😉

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