Maintenance of genome integrity lies at the heart of cell homeostasis. While DNA repair mechanisms have received significant attention since more than half a century, the contribution of the chromatin environment and nuclear organization to genome maintenance has only begun to emerge over the past decade. It is evident that chromatin, being the actual substrate for repair, replication and transcription machineries, is heavily remodeled following damage detection and exerts a key function in both targeting and regulating repair at different genomic loci.

The third edition of this EMBO Workshop continues to bring together an outstanding group of scientists from around the world, including young researchers as well as leaders in the field, to cover the following topics central to our understanding of chromatin function in nuclear organization and genome maintenance: (i) DNA repair in nuclear/chromatin domains, (ii) histone modifications following damage: writers, reader, erasers, (iii) nucleosome modification following DNA damage (remodellers, chaperones and histone variants), (iv) replication stress and endogenous damage, (v) transcription and RNA in DNA repair, and (vi) chromatin movement and physical constraints.