Cells sustain DNA damage from both endogenous and external sources and they have evolved elegant machinery to repair this damage. Deficient or aberrant repair results in mutations that can lead to cancer.

The 2010 conference on DNA Damage, Mutation, and Cancer will present cutting edge research into biochemical, molecular, and cellular aspects of DNA repair, mutagenesis, and cancer. Topics that will be covered include chemistry and recognition of DNA damage, mechanisms of DNA repair, tolerance, and lesion bypass, conformational dynamics, epigenetics of DNA repair, mouse models of human cancer, transcriptional and translational mutagenesis, and the use of DNA repair as a target for cancer therapy. The invited speakers, who are at the forefront of their fields, come from a variety of disciplines including chemistry, biochemistry, cell biology, and evolutionary biology. The conference will strongly encourage the presentation and discussion of unpublished results. We will also provide a platform for junior investigators to present short talks and these will be selected from the abstracts. We expect that the scientific exchange at the conference will impact cancer research in significant ways and result in establishing new multi-disciplinary collaborative efforts.