Clemson University TigerPrints All Dissertations Dissertations December 2017 The Evolutionary Diversity of Uracil DNA Glycosylase Superfamily Jing Li Clemson University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations Recommended Citation Li, Jing, "The Evolutionary Diversity of Uracil DNA Glycosylase Superfamily" (2017). All Dissertations. 2546. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/2546 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE EVOLUTIONARY DIVERSITY OF URACIL DNA GLYCOSYLASE SUPERFAMILY A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Biochemistry and Molecular Biology by Jing Li December 2017 Accepted by: Dr. Weiguo Cao, Committee Chair Dr. Alex Feltus Dr. Cheryl Ingram-Smith Dr. Jeremy Tzeng ABSTRACT Uracil DNA glycosylase (UDG) is a crucial member in the base excision (BER) pathway that is able to specially recognize and cleave the deaminated DNA bases, including uracil (U), hypoxanthine (inosine, I), xanthine (X) and oxanine (O). Currently, based on the sequence similarity of 3 functional motifs, the UDG superfamily is divided into 6 families. Each family has evolved distinct substrate specificity and properties. In this thesis, I broadened the UDG superfamily by characterization of three new groups of enzymes. In chapter 2, we identified a new subgroup of enzyme in family 3 SMUG1 from Listeria Innocua. This newly found SMUG1-like enzyme has distinct catalytic residues and exhibits strong preference on single-stranded DNA substrates.