PARP1  Poly [ADP-ribose] polymerase 1 (PARP-1) also known as NAD+ ADP-ribosyltransferase 1 or poly[ADP-ribose] synthase 1 is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the "PARP1" gene. It is one of the PARP family of enzymes. PARP1 works:   PARP1 is involved in:   PARP1 is activated by:   PARP1 acts as a first responder that detects DNA damage and then facilitates choice of repair pathway. PARP1 contributes to repair efficiency by modulating chromatin structure and by interacting with and modifying multiple DNA repair factors. PARP1 is implicated in the regulation of several DNA repair processes including the pathways of nucleotide excision repair, non-homologous end joining, microhomology-mediated end joining, homologous recombinational repair, and DNA mismatch repair. PARP1 has a role in repair of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) breaks. Knocking down intracellular PARP1 levels with siRNA or inhibiting PARP1 activity with small molecules reduces repair of ssDNA breaks. In the absence of PARP1, when these breaks are encountered during DNA replication, the replication fork stalls, and double-strand DNA (dsDNA) breaks accumulate. These dsDNA breaks are repaired via homologous recombination (HR) repair, a potentially error-free repair mechanism. For this reason, cells lacking PARP1 show a hyper-recombinagenic phenotype (e.g., an increased frequency of HR), which has also been observed in vivo in mice using the pun assay. Thus, if the HR pathway is functioning, PARP1 null mutants (cells without functioning PARP1) do not show an unhealthy phenotype, and in fact, PARP1 knockout mice show no negative phenotype and no increased incidence of tumor formation. PARP1 is one of six enzymes required for the highly error-prone DNA repair pathway microhomology-mediated end joining (MMEJ). MMEJ is associated with frequent chromosome abnormalities such as deletions, translocations, inversions and other complex rearrangements. When PARP1 is up-regulated, MMEJ is increased, causing genome instability. PARP1 is up-regulated and MMEJ is increased in tyrosine kinase-activated leukemias. PARP1 is also over-expressed when its promoter region ETS site is epigenetically hypomethylated, and this contributes to progression to endometrial cancer, BRCA-mutated ovarian cancer, and BRCA-mutated serous ovarian cancer.