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Help for the structure/grammer of this sentence
'In short order thereafter, the general concept that homologous recombination was part of a broader aspect of DNA metabolism, a process that not only repairs DNA with breaks, either single-stranded or double- stranded, but one that also intersects and overlaps with transcription and mismatch repair, and is affected by and affects chromosome structure. '
I think 'the general concept' is the subject， what is the verb? and object?
all the orange colored parts are the clause for me.
Thanks for any help!
May 14, 2020 10:23 AM
Comments · 4
You're quite right to be suspicious of this sentence : there is no verb ! 'The general concept' is indeed the subject, but the writer has become so carried away by his [or her] overblown dependent clause that (s)he has forgotten to finish the sentence. I imagine that it would have finished with something like 'became widely accepted' or 'was accepted as a standard tenet of molecular biology'.
May 14, 2020
I don’t see a verb, just a run-on description of general concept. Maybe the verb “is” is implied in general concept (is) that ...
May 14, 2020
Yes I don't like the sentence, but steered clear of commenting; because I am not an academic in molecular DNA, it struck me as not being written by such a person in any formal sense. And the writer did not give an indication as to who wrote it.
The verb/verbs may be as if looking at words individually in isolation, but like I said I am not an expert.
It is definitely an unfinished sentence...
May 14, 2020
I am not an expert so don't take this as the answer you may be looking for.
I believe repairs is an intransitive verb you are describing something in the process of being repaired.
And later 'mismatch repair' is a transitive verb. The subject is the concept.
Transcription is a noun
May 14, 2020
