Congratulations to Tanmoy Paul, Chunli Yan and Jina Yu who are co-authors on a just published paper in the journal Nature Communications. The paper is entitled “Molecular model of TFIIH recruitment to the transcription-coupled repair machinery“. Transcription-coupled repair is a vital nucleotide excision repair sub-pathway that removes DNA lesions from actively transcribed DNA strands. Binding of the CSB protein to lesion-stalled RNA polymerase II (Pol II) initiates the pathway by triggering the recruitment of downstream repair factors. Despite recent cryo-EM advances, it remains unknown how one such factor – transcription factor IIH (TFIIH) – is recruited to the intact transcription-coupled repair complex. Combining existing structural data with AlphaFold predictions, we built an integrative model of the initial TFIIH-bound complex and used large-scale molecular simulations to unveil its structural dynamics. We show how TFIIH can be first recruited in an open repair-inhibited conformation, which requires subsequent CAK kinase module removal and conformational closure to process damaged DNA. Collectively, our findings elucidate the coordinated assembly of repair proteins in early transcription-coupled repair.