| Abstract: | Abstract— A pyrimidine adduct, 6-4‘-pyrimidine-2’-one] thymine (PO-T)?, observed in DNA hydrolysates of 254-nm ultraviolet (u.v.) irradiated conidia of Streptomyces coelicolor, increases linearly with u.v. dose up to 2 × 105 ergs/mm2. Yields of thymine dimer (T○) and uracil-thymine dimer (U○) level off at much lower doses. Initial relative rates of formation of these u.v. photoproducts are: 1:1.3:4.8 for PO-T, T○ and U○, respectively. Similar results were obtained with a Streptomyces griseus mutant, PHR-1. An equation is derived to estimate the ratio of the amount of PO-T to the total amount of thymine-derived photoproducts at low (biological) u.v. doses. The observed PO-T fractions compare well with the calculated values. Rapid photolysis of the precursor of PO-T was observed by post-u. v. treatment at 313 nm of conidia of S. coelicolor and of S. griseus PHR-1. The photolysis was much slower at 365 nm and did not occur at all at 405 nm. Pyrimidine dimers were not appreciably affected by post-u. v. treatment at the above wavelengths in these Streptomyces strains. Both of these strains are phenotypically photoreactivation-deficient, and the present results indicate that they do not possess active photoreactivating enzyme. In earlier papers3,4,5], the pyrimidine adduct found in acid hydrolysates of DNA was loosely referred to as “uracil-thymine adduct (U-T adduct)”. Such terminology is not strictly correct. The pyrimidine adduct in acid hydrolysates is PO-T (sometimes called P2B), which could theoretically result from removal of ammonia from a C-T adduct or removal of water from a U-T adduct (see 6]). |
