The primary causes of sporadic human cancers are thought to be
environmental. Aromatic amines are among the most notorious environmental
carcinogens. Formation of bulky DNA adducts is believed to induce
chemical carcinogenesis. The key molecular players producing adverse
outcomes such as polymerases and repair proteins must be identified and
characterized in order to devise appropriate chemoprevention and risk
assessment strategies. We hypothesize that the binding affinities of
nucleotide excision repair (NER) proteins to arylamine adducts are
conformation-specific and contribute differently to biological outcomes.
We employ various biophysical techniques to determine the structural,
conformational, and thermodynamic aspects of conformation-specific
recognition.
