Philip Hanawalt

Administrative Appointments

• International Advisory Board, Chulabhorn Research Institute (2005 - present)
• Consultant, Achaogen (2005 - present)
• External Advisory Comm, MD Anderson Cancer Center (2004 - present)
• Abbott-ASM Lifetime Ach Selection Committee, American Academy of Microbiology (2003 - 2006)
• External Advisory Board, Lawrence Livermore Labs (2001 - present)
View All 13administrative appointments of Philip Hanawalt

Honors and Awards

• Lectureship, Spanish Academy of Science & Catalan Society (1982)
• Inaugural Annual Lecture, Lord Dowding Fund for Humane Research (1982)
• Fellow, American Association for Advancement of Sciences (1981)

Professional Education

Graduate & Fellowship Program Affiliations

• Biophysics
• Cancer Biology
• Dermatology

Web Site Links

• My Lab Site

Research Interests

Hanawalt has been a productive researcher in the field of DNA repair since his pioneering discovery of repair replication in E. coli in 1963. He also first demonstrated repair replication in mycoplasmata and in a eukaryote and he has developed a number of important experimental approaches for studying repair, beginning with the BrdUrd density labeling method for resolving semiconservatively replicated DNA from parental DNA containing repair patches. Hanawalt’s approach was used to validate the widely-used phenomenon of unscheduled DNA synthesis as a measure of DNA repair, and also to document the first example of a human hereditary disease due to a deficiency in DNA repair. Other significant research contributions from Hanawalt’s laboratory have included: the demonstration of preferential mutagenesis by N-methyl nitrosoguanidine at DNA replication forks and its application to mapping genes; early evidence for membrane association of DNA replication complexes in E. coli and in mammalian cells; discovery of long-patch excision-repair in E. coli and the demonstration that it is an inducible component of the RecA-LexA regulatory circuit; discovery of a gene controlling nucleoside uptake in E. coli; development of permeabilized bacterial and mammalian cell systems to study excision-repair pathways; demonstration of enhanced survival of UV irradiated Simian Virus 40 upon treating the host cells with low doses of UV or chemical carcinogens; discovery that the repair enzyme, T4 endonuclease V, operates processively on damaged DNA; discovery that certain types of damage in transfecting plasmid DNA markedly enhances the efficiency of stable transformation in human cells; and the discovery that UV irradiation of short sequences of nucleotides can result in their ligation through pyrimidine dimerization, providing a plausible mechanism for prebiotic assembly of high molecular weight duplex DNA.

In 1982 Hanawalt and his colleagues reported the first example of intragenomic...

Publications

• New applications of the Comet assay: Comet-FISH and transcription-coupled DNA repair. Spivak G, Cox RA, Hanawalt PC. Mutat Res. 2009 Jan-Feb; 681 (1): 44-50
• Emerging links between premature ageing and defective DNA repair. Hanawalt PC, Mech Ageing Dev. 2008 Jul-Aug; 129 (7-8): 503-5
• Inhibitory effect of a short Z-DNA forming sequence on transcription elongation by T7 RNA polymerase. Ditlevson JV, Tornaletti S, Belotserkovskii BP, Teijeiro V, Wang G, Vasquez KM, Hanawalt PC. Nucleic Acids Res. 2008; 36 (10): 3163-70
• Transcription-coupled DNA repair: two decades of progress and surprises. Hanawalt PC, Spivak G. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol. 2008; 9 (12): 958-70
• Paradigms for the three rs: DNA replication, recombination, and repair. Hanawalt PC, Mol Cell. 2007; 28 (5): 702-7