Tilting at windmills? The nucleotide excision repair of chromosomal DNA

A typical view of how DNA repair functions in chromatin usually depicts a struggle in which the DNA repair machinery battles to overcome the inhibitory effect of chromatin on the repair process. It may be that in this current interpretation the repair mechanisms are ‘tilting at windmills’, fighting an imaginary foe. An emerging picture suggests that we should not consider chromatin as an inhibitory force to be overcome like some quixotic giant by the DNA repair processes. Instead we should now recognize that DNA repair and chromatin metabolism are inextricably and mechanistically linked. Here we discuss the latest findings which are beginning to reveal how changes in chromatin dynamics integrate with the DNA repair process in response to UV induced DNA damage, with an emphasis on events in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.