DNA polymerase that promotes MMEJ (microhomology-mediated end-joining), an alternative NHEJ (non-homologous end-joining) machinery triggered in response to double-strand breaks in DNA. MMEJ is an error-prone repair pathway that produces deletions of sequences from the strand being repaired and promotes genomic rearrangements, such as telomere fusions, some of them leading to cellular transformation. POLQ acts as an inhibitor of homology-recombination repair (HR) pathway by limiting RAD51 accumulation at resected ends. POLQ-mediated MMEJ may be required to promote the survival of cells with a compromised HR repair pathway, thereby preventing genomic havoc by resolving unrepaired lesions.