Ivaylo Ivanov, associate professor of chemistry, and his colleagues have worked to better understand the process of how the body repairs DNA, which could help scientists develop new ways to fix inherited mutations that cause diseases. They recently made a discovery, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about how a key enzyme — known as thymine DNA glycosylase (TDG) — initiates the repair process. TDG acts as the first line of defense by identifying the damaged base (the building blocks of the DNA double helix) and removing it using a “pinch-push-pull” mechanism.