Cadmium chloride down-regulates the expression of Rad51 in HC11 cells and reduces knock-in efficiency

Abstract

Gene targeting is a useful technique for inserting foreign genes into a specific locus in the genome. The major pathways of double-strand break (DSB) repair are homologous recombination (HR) and non-homologous end joining (NHEJ). The HR pathway is utilized to accurately insert foreign genes into the genome, but it occurs only during the S/G2 phase, and its efficiency for DSB repair is lower than that of NHEJ (Vasquez et al., 2001;Mao et al., 2008). Thus, studies have been performed to improve the efficiency of HR for accurate gene targeting. The HR-