Putting a finger on meiosis

The proper processing of DNA lesions is critical to faithful chromosome segregation and genome integrity. As part of a larger complex of proteins, Topoisomerase 3 (TOP3) can decatenate joint DNA structures and reverse invading DNA strands during recombination in meiosis and mitosis. Besides a catalytic domain, TOP3 contains C-terminal zinc finger domains (ZnF) whose functions remain poorly understood. The lab of Verena Jantsch has now demonstrated that the deletion of this domain elicits a delay in the processing of recombination intermediates, which contrasts the penetrant embryonic death seen in the gene disruption allele.

The study is published in Nucleic Acids Research.