The Use of Electrophoretic Mobility Shift Assays to Study DNA Repair

DNA repair pathways must include proteins that recognize and bind to damaged DNA. The search for such proteins has been facilitated by the use of electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSAs), which were first used to detect transcription factors that bind to specific DNA sequences (1 ,2 ). To study DNA repair, EMSAs have been adapted to detect proteins that bind to specific DNA lesions or structures.