Cohesin in DNA damage response and double-strand break repair

Abstract

Cohesin, a four-subunit ring comprising SMC1, SMC3, RAD21 and SA1/2, tethers sister chromatids by DNA replication-coupled cohesion (RC-cohesion) to guarantee correct chromosome segregation during cell proliferation. Postreplicative cohesion, also called damage-induced cohesion (DI-cohesion), is an emerging critical player in DNA damage response (DDR). In this review, we sum up recent progress on how cohesin regulates the DNA damage checkpoint activation and repair pathway choice, emphasizing postreplicative cohesin loading and DI-cohesion establishment in yeasts and mammals. DI-cohesion and RC-cohesion show distinct features in many aspects. DI-cohesion near or far from the break sites might undergo different regulations and execute different tasks in DDR and DSB repair. Furthermore, some open questions in this field and the significance of this new scenario to our understanding of genome stability maintenance and cohesinopathies are discussed.

Keywords:

• Chromatin
• sister chromatid cohesion
• DNA damage-induced cohesion
• DNA damage response (DDR)
• double-strand break (DSB)

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 32101039, 32161133015, and 31630005); Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation (Grant no. 5204036); National Key R&D Program of China (Grant no. 2019YFA0903900).