25 February 2021 Alice Bolner receives CS&D Best Publication Award Back to news Alice Bolner, from the group of Puck Knipscheer, received the CS&D Best Publication Award on the 25th of February. She received this honorable award for her paper, published in Nature, underlining the link between alcohol consumption and cancer. She gave a seminar about the paper at the accompanying CS&D seminar series. Every year, the Cancer, Stem Cell and Developmental Biology (CS&D) graduate school awards a PhD-candidate with the Best Publication Award. This year, Alice Bolner received the honor for her paper titled “Alcohol-derived DNA crosslinks are repaired by two distinct mechanisms”, that was published in Nature in 2020. Together with her colleagues from the Knipscheer group and the KJ Patel Lab (MRC_LMB, Cambridge, UK), she discovered a new way in which the human body repairs DNA damage that is caused by a degradation product of alcohol. Interstrand crosslink When alcohol is metabolized, acetaldehyde is formed. This product causes so-called interstrand crosslinks (ICLs), entailing that two strands of DNA become connected in an unnatural way. This is a dangerous kind of DNA damage because it obstructs cell division and protein production. An accumulation of ICLs can lead to cell death and cancer. Treatment for cancer Together with her colleagues, Bolner studied the mechanisms that repair alcohol-induced ICLs using extracts from frog eggs. The previously known Fanconi anemia (FA) pathway cuts the DNA with the ICL to repair the damage. In her paper, Bolner describes how she and her colleagues discovered an additional repair mechanism, which works even faster and cuts the ICL itself. Insight into DNA damage repair may lead to a better understanding of treatment for alcohol-related types of cancer and the blood disorder Fanconi anemia. Read more about the paper here.
