“…Single strand breaks are repaired chiefly through the base excision repair pathway (BER) whilst double strand breaks are dealt with through either homologous recombinational repair (HRR), where the undamaged copy in the homologous chromosome or sister chromatid is used as a template for repair, or via nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) [Hoeijmakers, 2001;Jackson, 2002;Slupphaug et al, 2003]. Polymorphic variation in DNA repair genes has been reported to influence the response to in vitro irradiation as measured by cell cycle delay [Hu et al, 2001], cytogenetic damage [Lunn et al, 2000;Au et al, 2003;Marcon et al, 2003], and DNA single strand break induction and repair using the Comet assay [Aka et al, 2004;Godderis et al, 2004;Rzeszowska-Wolny et al, 2005]. However, whilst variation in DNA repair gene polymorphisms has been reported to influence the in vivo frequencies of micronuclei [Angelini et al, 2005] and unstable chromosome aberrations [Kiuru et al, 2005] following low dose irradiation, no such effect was found when stable translocations were used as the endpoint [Kiuru et al, 2005;Wilding et al, 2005].…”