A research group in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta is hoping its latest discovery could one day be used to develop new therapies that target certain types of cancers.

The discovery by Mark Glover, his graduate student Zahra Havali-Shahriari and post-doctoral fellow Nicolas Coquelle has shed light on what happens in cells when DNA is damaged. They solved the structure of a DNA repair enzyme called polynucleotide kinase/phosphatase, or PNKP. This allows them to see what is happening when this enzyme is repairing DNA.