Comment Re:Other DNA damage? (Score 1) 97
There are ~150 proteins in the human genome that operate through ~5 processes (some overlap) to maintain and repair DNA damage. DNA damage from many carcinogens would modify individual bases which are maintained through Base Excision repair or Mismatch Repair [2]. Radiation on the other hand (at least the ionizing kind -- X-rays and Gamma-rays) produces free radicals in the cells and can induce single strand and double strand breaks in the DNA backbone. DNA double strand breaks are potentially the most harmful as they must be repaired and in non-dividing cells the probable repair process is the Non-Homologous-End-Joining (NHEJ) which involves the WRN and DCLRE1C proteins which have exonuclease activities which can delete DNA bases from the DNA strands. These in turn introduce microdeletions (or in some cases microinsertions) which can corrupt gene sequences producing downstream problems (unfolded proteins, malfunctioning proteins, diminished protein production, cell death, etc.).
The photolyase enzyme which is involved in repairing thymine dimers (produced by UV radiation) is much simpler than most of the other DNA repair mechanisms. All known organisms with the possible exception of Deinococcus radiodurans and its close relatives repair DNA double strand breaks using similar, potentially genome corrupting, processes because not repairing such breaks is much worse than repairing them and potentially corrupting a small portion of the genome. The problem is that the accumulation of such botched repair processes likely plays a major role in aging. (Think of your body as an running instance of Microsoft Word and cosmic rays are going through your RAM flipping bits in memory. One hour the print function stops working, next hour the copy function stops working, next hour the dictionary lookup stops working, etc. [1] eventually it gets to the point where nothing works and you have to reload it. Bodies are currently not reloadable).
1. We are assuming here that the bit-flipping isn't introducing segmentation violations, etc. Bodies tend to be fairly error tolerant due to the cellular redundancy but the faulty fixups do accumulate over time.
2. All of the DNA repair process have greater or lesser degrees of reliability. Base excision repair is likely to work most of the time. Mismatch repair can be much more a roll of the dice.