8-oxo-dGTP

Active oxygen species in the nucleotide pool of the cell can produce 8-oxo-dGTP (8-oxo-7,8-dihydrodeoxyguanosine triphosphate), which can then be incorporated into cellular DNA.

Human cells contain enzyme activity that hydrolyzes 8-oxo-dGTP to 8-oxo-dGMP, thereby preventing occurrence of mutations caused by misincorporation.

This oxidative DNA damage is restored by the base excision repair (BER) pathway that is conserved from bacteria to humans and is initiated by DNA glycosylases, which simply remove the aberrant base from the DNA backbone by hydrolyzing the N-glycosidic bond (monofunctional DNA glycosylase), or further catalyze the incision of a resulting abasic site (bifunctional DNA glycosylase).