Thanks for doing this! Just seeing the concept makes me realize how subjective my assessments of sunburn risk are.
One thing I’ve been wondering lately is the effects of interrupted vs uninterrupted sun exposure. E.g., if I spend an hour outside, an hour inside, and then another hour outside, how does that compare to the effects of two continuous hours outside? I’ve tried a bit of googling, but the information is surprisingly hard to find.
What I have learned is that UV-induced DNA damage is mostly single-strand breaks that can be repaired via nucleotide excision repair, but I’m not sure how long that takes. I did find this on the simpler related process of base excision repair:
BER reactions in cells are extremely fast, and in many cases, an individual BER event may take only a few minutes (10,11). The repair of acute DNA damage requires several rounds of BER and can take several hours, as the amount of BER enzymes is limited.
To me that suggests a model where sun damage accumulates at a rate depending on exposure, is repaired at a fixed rate, and damage reaching a certain threshold triggers a sunburn.
Thanks for doing this! Just seeing the concept makes me realize how subjective my assessments of sunburn risk are.
One thing I’ve been wondering lately is the effects of interrupted vs uninterrupted sun exposure. E.g., if I spend an hour outside, an hour inside, and then another hour outside, how does that compare to the effects of two continuous hours outside? I’ve tried a bit of googling, but the information is surprisingly hard to find.
What I have learned is that UV-induced DNA damage is mostly single-strand breaks that can be repaired via nucleotide excision repair, but I’m not sure how long that takes. I did find this on the simpler related process of base excision repair:
(Dramatically-titled source)
To me that suggests a model where sun damage accumulates at a rate depending on exposure, is repaired at a fixed rate, and damage reaching a certain threshold triggers a sunburn.
I think that’s a quite interesting topic / question. I may see if I can find any info on it, but for now am less informed than you.