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. 2020 May 25;11(5):585. doi: 10.3390/genes11050585

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© 2020 by the authors.

Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Main DNA repair pathways. (A) base excision repair (BER), nucleotide excision repair (NER) and mismatch repair (MMR) repair damaged or mismatched bases. Lesions are recognized and excised, creating a relatively small gap (1–30 nt) that will be filled by a DNA polymerase; (B) nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ, left) or homologous recombination repair (HRR, right) mediate double-strand break repair. NHEJ seals the breaks with compatible extremities. Incompatible extremities can lead to either a perfect repair or to mutations (base insertions or deletions). HRR starts with the resection of the extremities. Resected extremities are used for strand invasion, homology search and D-loop formation in the sister chromatid, allowing perfect repair of the double-strand break; (C) HRR safeguards replication. At a stalled replication fork, a single-strand break is generated to allow the subsequent resection and strand invasion in a process named break-induced replication (BIR).