How Breast Cancer Hijacks a Natural Enzyme to Boost Mutations

September 29, 2023 • by Marc Airhart

Kyle Miller and his team discovered a potential new target for drug therapies: structures in our DNA called R-loops.

Red dots under a microscope indicate the location and quantity of R-loops in cancer cells

A human cancer cell that overexpresses the enzyme APOBEC3B (left) has fewer R-loops (red) than a cancer cell that has been genetically modified to have no APOBEC3B (right). That’s because the enzyme mutates and then helps resolve R-loops. Credit: Kyle Miller/University of Texas at Austin.


An illustration of how an enzyme caleld APOBEC3B mutates a section of DNA called an R-loop

The enzyme APOBEC3B targets the exposed single stranded DNA of an R-loop and changes a letter C to a letter T. In cancer cells, this can happen often and lead to potentially useful mutations. Credit: Kyle Miller/University of Texas at Austin.

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