Endogenous and exogenous factors constantly challenge cellular DNA, generating cytotoxic and/or mutagenic DNA adducts. As a result, organisms have evolved different mechanisms to defend against the deleterious effects of DNA damage. Among these diverse repair pathways, direct DNA-repair systems provide cells with simple yet efficient solutions to reverse covalent DNA adducts. In this review, we focus on recent advances in the field of direct DNA repair, namely, photolyase-, alkyltransferase-, and dioxygenase-mediated repair processes. We present specific examples to describe new findings of known enzymes and appealing discoveries of new proteins. At the end of this article, we also briefly discuss the influence of direct DNA repair on other fields of biology and its implication on the discovery of new biology. E ndogenous and environmental agents continuously threaten the genomic integrity of all living organisms. Replication of damaged DNA can lead to mutations that are tumorigenic, whereas DNA lesions that block replication or transcription can result in senescence and cell death. Therefore, cellular DNA must be promptly repaired. Well-known mechanisms include base-excision repair, nucleotide excision repair, mismatch repair, homologous recombination, and nonhomologous end joining. In addition, nature has also evolved several mechanisms in which the damage is directly reversed most often by a single repair protein without the incision of DNA backbone. Although such "direct repair" processes mediate the reversal of a relatively small set of DNA lesions, the simplicity and essentially error-free property of the direct reversal processes make them particularly attractive for a cell. Three major mechanisms of direct DNA repair have been identified to date: (i) photolyases reverse UV light-induced photolesions; (ii) O 6 -alkylguanine-DNA alkyltransferases (AGTs) reverse a set of O-alkylated DNA damage; and (iii) the AlkB family dioxygenases reverse N-alkylated base adducts (Fig. 1). This concise article intends to update knowledge since the publication of the second edition of DNA Repair and Mutagenesis (ASM) (Friedberg et al. 2006).