DNA repair plays a crucial role at the replication fork to ensure the fidelity and completeness of DNA replication. Without these repair processes, genetic material would accumulate errors and damage during replication, leading to mutations and genomic instability.

Outcomes: The project has focused both on how base-excision repair proteins associate with the replication sliding clamp PCNA to repair erroneously incorporated DNA bases (post-replicatively), and with the single-strand binding protein RPA to correct lesions occurring immediately preceding the replicative polymerases (pre-replicatively). Here, the collective group has published landmark findings regarding orchestration of both processes, including the roles of post-translational modifications. A current focus is to elucidate how RPA acts as a hub to facilitate removal of base lesions in ssDNA in front of the polymerases, while concomitantly promoting fork reversal to restore the double-stranded conformation and allow templated, error-free repair. We also investigate non-repair functions of replication-associated repair proteins and their relation to human disease.