The purpose of this workshop is to bring together scientists from the European Union (EU) and US to discuss our current understanding of how protein machines assemble and sort through genomic DNA to identify specific damaged sites which are repaired through the two critical repair pathways: nucleotide excision repair (NER) or interstrand crosslink repair (ICR). Several of the enzymes perform dual functions in both pathways, thus combining these two topics in one meeting provides tremendous synergy and is the unique feature of this workshop. Many endogenous agents, environmental toxicants and chemotherapeutic agents cause DNA damage that is repaired through these two mechanisms. The importance of the repair pathways acting on these forms of damage is underscored by the fact that their loss or dysregulation is associated with a variety of devastating heritable human conditions including cancer, neurodegeneration, premature aging and severe developmental abnormalities. The workshop will move from molecules to man and include a discussion of the disease syndromes associated with poor repair of these damage substrates. The main objective of this workshop is to fully address the problem of damage recognition and processing involved in nucleotide excision repair and interstrand crosslink repair by generating an understanding of the current state of the science and then articulate where the science will go once current technical and scientific hurdles are overcome. The main goals of this workshop are to: 1) highlight the state of the science and current technologies being used to study this problem;2) exchange ideas between scientists in the EU and US;and 3) provide a forum that allows scientists in the local region an opportunity to meet and engage with scientists from the EU and US who are driving the field.
A wide variety of environmental toxicants induce DNA damage. This meeting will bring together experts from the United States and the European Union who study two overlapping DNA repair pathways, which remove potentially mutagenic and toxic environmentally-induced DNA lesions involving helix-distorting lesions and interstrand crosslinks. The workshop will move from molecules to man and include a discussion of the disease syndromes associated with poor repair of these damage substrates. By having this meeting in Slovakia it will help provide technical expertise to scientists in those EU countries with less-developed scientific infrastructure.
