Atmospheric-pressure plasma jet induces DNA double-strand breaks that require a Rad51-mediated homologous recombination for repair in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

•Plasma jet generates different reactive molecules depending on their feeding gases.•Yeast rad51 mutant is highly sensitive to air plasma jet but not to N2 plasma jet.•DNA double-strand break repair proteins are required for air plasma resistance.•Air plasma jet induces DSB-mediated genomic instability and cell death.

Non-thermal plasma generated under atmospheric pressure produces a mixture of chemically reactive molecules and has been developed for a number of biomedical applications. Recently, plasma jet has been proposed as novel cancer therapies based on the observation that free radicals generated by plasma jet induce mitochondria-mediated apoptotic cell death. We show here that air plasma jet induces DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) in yeast chromosomes leading to genomic instability and loss of viability, which are alleviated by Rad51, the yeast homolog of Escherichiacoli RecA recombinase, through DNA damage repair by a homologous recombination (HR) process. Hypersensitivity of rad51 mutant to air plasma was not restored by antioxidant treatment unlike sod1 mutant that was highly sensitive to reactive oxygen species (ROS) challenge, suggesting that plasma jet induces DSB-mediated cell death independent of ROS generation. These results may provide a new insight into the mechanism of air plasma jet-induced cell death.