SAE2 is a gene in budding yeast, coding for the protein Sae2, which is involved in DNA repair. Sae2 is a part of the homologous recombination process in response to double-strand breaks. ^[1] It is best characterized in the yeast model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae. ^[2] Homologous genes in other organisms include Ctp1 in fission yeast, Com1 in plants, and CtIP in higher eukaryotes including humans. ^[2]

Sae2 and its homologs have relatively long low-complexity regions in their primary sequences and appear to have large intrinsically unstructured regions. Sae2 likely forms tetramers through coiled-coil sequences. ^[2] Proteins of this family are DNA-binding proteins and are involved in DNA end resection and bridging at double-strand breaks. ^{[3] [4]} Sae2 has been reported to have endonuclease activity, ^[5] though it has no bioinformatically recognizable nuclease sequence and reports of this activity are not consistent in the literature. ^{[6] [2]}

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