Over the course of the past year, it has been our privilege to work with Drew Gwilliams and the staff at the Royal Society of Chemistry to conceptualize, design, and bring to fruition a series of comprehensive reviews on DNA damage, DNA repair and disease that focus in a number of major topic areas, including the identification and quantification of the broad spectrum of DNA damages, cellular responses to genomic DNA modifications, mutagenesis, disease consequences, and therapeutic interventions. To accomplish this goal, we drew upon the expertise of numerous world-renowned laboratories who have distinguished track records in these areas—we were humbled by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response and it is through the countless hours of effort from all who contributed to these 31 chapters, we are deeply indebted. Thank you!

Our goal was to assemble a unique book with an overlapping continuum of reviews that begin with a major emphasis on the mechanisms through which DNA damages are formed, their impact on DNA structure and how they are measured by various methodologies and techniques. These reviews are primarily clustered within the opening chapters, but there are strong chemistry-centric reviews throughout the book. This grouping of chapters is followed by a series of chapters that focus on the DNA repair mechanisms, primarily the DNA base excision repair pathway, that cleanse the genome of less bulky/distorting lesions but also includes mechanisms of nucleotide excision repair and nucleotide incision repair. For the DNA lesions that escape repair and undergo replication, several chapters deal with translesion DNA synthesis and mutagenic outcomes. The final chapters are organized around the disease outcomes including aging and age-related diseases that are associated with deficiencies in the repair of DNA damage and with strategies to intervene in these diseases, including current clinical trials with various small molecule inhibitors of DNA repair proteins as anticancer drugs.

This book is divided into two volumes with Chapters 1–15 in Volume 1 and Chapters 16–31 in Volume 2.

Miral Dizdaroglu and R. Stephen Lloyd