“School of Biological Sciences”

Back to Papers Home
Back to Papers of School of Biological Sciences

Paper   IPM / Biological Sciences / 15406
School of Biological Sciences
  Title:   The effect of stochasticity on repair of DNA double strand breaks throughout non-homologous end joining pathway
  Author(s): 
1.  Fazeleh S Mohseni-Salehi
2.  Fatemeh Zare-Mirakabad
3.  Soudeh Ghafouri-Fard
4.  Mehdi Sadeghi
  Status:   Published
  Journal: Mathematical medicine and biology: a journal of the IMA
  Year:  2017
  Pages:   https://doi.org/10.1093/imammb/dqx017
  Supported by:  IPM
  Abstract:
DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) are the most lethal lesions of DNA induced by ionizing radiation, industrial chemicals and a wide variety of drugs used in chemotherapy. In the context of DNA damage response system modelling, uncertainty may arise in several ways such as number of induced DSBs, kinetic rates and measurement error in observable quantities. Therefore, using the stochastic approaches is imperative to gain further insight into the dynamic behaviour of DSBs repair process. In this article, a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) model of the non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) mechanism is formulated according to the DSB complexity. Additionally, a Metropolis Monte Carlo method is used to perform maximum likelihood estimation of the kinetic rate constants. Here, the effects of fluctuating kinetic rates and DSBs induction rate of the NHEJ mechanism are investigated. The stochastic realizations of the total yield of simple and complex DSBs ligation are simulated to compare their asymptotic dynamics. Furthermore, it has been proved that the total yield of DSBs has a normal distribution for sufficiently large number of DSBs. In order to estimate the expected duration of repairing DSBs, the probability distribution of DSBs lifetime is calculated based on the CTMC NHEJ model. Moreover, the variability of total yield of DSBs during constant low-dose radiation is evaluated in the presented model. The findings indicate that in stochastic NHEJ model, when there is no new DSBs induction through the repair process, all DSBs are eventually repaired. However, when DSBs are induced by constant low-dose radiation, a number of DSBs remains un-repaired.

Download TeX format
back to top
scroll left or right