DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) are dangerous lesions that if not properly repaired can lead to genomic change or cell death. Organisms have developed several pathways and have many factors devoted to repairing DSBs, which broadly occurs by homologous recombination, which relies on an identical or homologous sequence to template repair, or nonhomologous end-joining. Much of our understanding of these repair mechanisms has come from the study of induced DNA cleavage by site-specific endonucleases. In addition to their biological role, these cellular pathways can be co-opted for gene editing to study gene function or for gene therapy or other applications. While the first gene editing experiments were done more than 20 years ago, the recent discovery of RNA-guided endonucleases has simplified approaches developed over the years to make gene editing an approach that is available to the entire biomedical research community. Here, we review DSB repair mechanisms and site-specific cleavage systems that have provided insight into these mechanisms and led to the current gene editing revolution.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 14. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 24 February 2026.
All research outputs
#2,777,544
of 26,832,738 outputs
Outputs from DNA Repair
#45
of 1,293 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#40,675
of 314,640 outputs
Outputs of similar age from DNA Repair
#2
of 44 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,832,738 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 89th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,293 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 4.0. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 314,640 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 86% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 44 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 95% of its contemporaries.
