Each one of the trillions of cells that make up the human body suffers more than 10,000 DNA lesions every day. These injuries would be catastrophic if cells were unable to repair them, but a very delicate machinery that detects and repair genetic damage is at work to prevent DNA mutations and diseases such as cancer. With the help of machine learning applied to high-throughput microscopy, among other techniques, researcher Bárbara Martínez, a member of the Metabolism and Cell Signalling Group led by Alejo Efeyan at the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), along with Raul Mostoslavsky and his team from Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, USA), have managed to visualize this DNA repair machinery in detail and identified new repair proteins. These results, designed in Boston, developed between Boston and Madrid, and published this week in Cell Reports, could help develop new cancer therapies.