Congratulations to Jina Yu, Chunli Yan, Tanmoy Paul and Lucas Brewer who are co-authors on a just published paper in the journal Nature Communications. The paper is entitled “Molecular architecture and functional dynamics of the pre-incision complex in nucleotide excision repair.” The nucleotide excision repair (NER) pathway is vital for genome integrity. By synthesizing cryo-EM and XL-MS data with computational modeling and AlphaFold2 predictions, we elucidate the structure and dynamics of a critically important state of the NER machinery – the pre-incision complex (PInC). Our analyses yield key mechanistic insights into PInC’s assembly and regulation, the structural basis of XPF and XPG nuclease coordination, and the licensing of the NER dual incision. Using graph-theoretical algorithms, we moreover build dynamic network models of the PInC, which powerfully elucidate the etiology of devastating human genetic syndromes.