This one-day DNA repair meeting was held at City University, London for the fourth consecutive year (P. Strike, Recent advances in DNA repair, mutation and recombination-a report of the meeting of the British Photobiology Society, London, 20 December 1993, Mutation Res. 315 (1994) 75-84; P. Strike, Recent advances in DNA repair and recombination: a report of the DNA Repair Network held at City University, London on 19 December 1994, Mutation Res. 337 (1995) 61-71 ; N.J. Jones, P. Strike, Recent research in DNA repair, mutation and recombination: a report of the DNA Repair Network meeting held at City University, London on 18 December 1995, Mutation Res. 364 (1996) 13-23). The programme consisted of 18 pre-offered talks, there being no specially invited speakers. The meeting was well attended with over 150 participants representing 23 universities, research institutes and hospitals the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. Overseas attendees represented laboratories from Japan, The Netherlands and Spain. The topics of the talks were varied and included mismatch repair, the repair of oxidative damage, transcription-coupled repair and various mutagen-hypersensitive human syndromes. Although wide-ranging, one recurring themes in many of the talks was that of homologous proteins and the correspondence of repair mechanisms in bacterial, fungal and mammalian systems.