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Biased gene repair needs unbiased review

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 4, page 752 (2003)Cite this article

A Correspondence to this article was published on 01 September 2003

Sir

The recent article by Liu et al. entitled 'The development and regulation of gene repair'1 evaluated the progress in the field and summarized the achievements in understanding the molecular mechanism of oligonucleotide-directed gene repair. We agree with the importance of a continuing effort to understand the potential and the limitations of this controversial approach, but we disagree with the mechanistic aspects of gene repair that are claimed in the review by Liu et al.: (1) mismatch repair is involved in the process, (2) a double D-loop is an obligatory intermediate in gene repair and (3) strand-pairing is the rate-limiting step. In addition, we emphasize the importance of clonal analysis, which has been missing in most studies of gene repair and the development of general selection procedures that are required for practical application of this technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Biology, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, 19107, Pennsylvania, USA

    Kyonggeun Yoon, Vitali Alexeev & Olga Igoucheva

  2. Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, 19107, Pennsylvania, USA

    Kyonggeun Yoon

Authors
  1. Kyonggeun Yoon
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  2. Vitali Alexeev
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  3. Olga Igoucheva
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Correspondence to Kyonggeun Yoon.

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Yoon, K., Alexeev, V. & Igoucheva, O. Biased gene repair needs unbiased review. Nat Rev Genet 4, 752 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1156-c1

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