Displaced protons damage DNA

[C]omputational chemists at the University of Georgia have discovered for the first time that when a proton is knocked off one of the pairs of bases that make up DNA, a chain of damage begins that causes "lesions" in the DNA. These lesions, when replicated in the copying mechanisms of DNA, can lead to serious disorders such as cancer.

The research [was] just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)...

Call it a "pinball proton." While chemists have shown other causes of DNA damage, the report in PNAS is the first to report how protons, knocked away by such mechanisms as radiation or chemical exposure, can cause lesions in DNA. The work was done entirely on computers in the Center for Computational Chemistry, part of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at UGA.

"This kind of damage in DNA subunits is about as basic as you can get," said Schaefer. "This is the simplest kind of lesion possible for such a system."

This article is on interest for two reasons. First, it begins to, perhaps, tell us how cancer may originate or at least tell us something about DNA damaging mechanisms. This is the obvious reason. Slightly more subtle is that the work was done entirely with a computational model. That is, there was no experimentation done with actual DNA molecules. Just computers simulating how DNA would behave under various conditions.

Hopefully, this work will be expanded to real, physical DNA and we'll learn more.