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Updated: Oct 7, 2026

Visualizing and Quantifying Endonuclease-Based Site-Specific DNA Damage
Published on: August 21, 2021
Immune responses to DNA in normal and aberrant immunity
1Department of Medicine, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC 27710, USA. dpiset@acpub.duke.edu
Abstract:
Because of structural microheterogeneity, DNA can exert powerful effects that lead to immune system activation as well as antibody induction. These activating effects resemble those ofendotoxin and result from sequences that occur much more commonly in bacterial DNA than in mammalian DNA. In contrast, mammalian DNA can inhibit the response to bacterial DNA as well as other stimuli and may serve a counterregulatory role during infection. The recognition of the immune effects of DNA is relevant to the pathogenesis of a variety of infectious and inflammatory diseases including systemic lupus erythematosus, a prototypic autoimmune disease characterized by anti-DNA autoantibodies.
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