Principal Investigator Bevin Engelward
Project Website http://web.mit.edu/engelward-lab/BASIC.htm
We have found that certain chemicals produced during inflammation are highly recombinogenic.
We are interested in identifying common human exposures that induce homologous recombination. Inflammation is an important risk factor for cancer. In fact, >10% of cancers world wide are associated with infectious diseases, many of which induce chronic inflammation. In studies of microbial cells, we found that homologous recombination is one of the most important DNA repair processes for preventing toxicity induced by reactive nitrogen species (see Spek et al., 2001 and Spek et al., 2002). Recently, we found that certain chemicals excreted by activated macrophages during inflammation are highly recombinogenic. These results suggest that inflammatory chemicals may be among the most recombinogenic exposures common to the human experience.
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