The existing methodologies for studying robust responses of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1) to DNA damage with strand breaks are often not suitable for examining its subtle responses to altered DNA without strand breaks, such as UV-damaged DNA. Here we describe two novel assays with which we characterized the interaction of PARP-1 with UV-damaged DNA in vivo and in vitro. Using an in situ fractionation technique to selectively remove free PARP-1 while retaining the DNA-bound PARP-1, we demonstrate a direct recruitment of the endogenous or exogenous PARP-1 to the UV-lesion site in vivo after local irradiation. In addition, using the model oligonucleotides with single UV lesion surrounded by multiple restriction enzyme sites, we demonstrate in vitro that DDB2 and PARP-1 can simultaneously bind to UV-damaged DNA and that PARP-1 casts a bilateral asymmetric footprint from −12 to +9 nucleotides on either side of the UV-lesion. These techniques will permit characterization of different roles of PARP-1 in the repair of UV-damaged DNA and also allow the study of normal housekeeping roles of PARP-1 with undamaged DNA.The abundance of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1) in mammalian cells and its rapid catalytic activation to form polymers of ADP-ribose (PAR) in the presence of various types of DNA damages with or without strand breaks has made it an ideal first responder at the lesion site to influence downstream events 1,2 . Apart from DNA damages, PARP-1 is also recruited to DNA during normal physiological processes such as transcription and chromatin remodeling 3 , which do not involve overt DNA damage but just altered DNA structures. While we know much more about how PARP-1 rapidly recognizes and binds to single or double strand breaks in DNA, we know very little about how PARP-1 interacts with DNA damages or altered DNA structures without strand breaks. The key reason is that the existing methodologies that readily identify interactions of PARP-1 with DNA strand breaks are not sufficiently sensitive to study the relatively weaker responses of PARP-1 to DNA damage without strand breaks. The response of PARP-1 to UVC-induced direct photolesions, such as cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPD) that are formed without any DNA strand breaks exemplifies this problem.Recent studies from others and our team have shown the involvement of PARP-1 in the host cell reactivation 4 and specifically in the nucleotide excision repair (NER) of UV-damaged DNA through its interaction with early NER protein DDB2 [5][6][7] . Additional studies have shown that downstream NER proteins XPA 8,9 and XPC 10 are PARylated. Thus, PARP-1 possibly has multiple roles in NER, but we do not yet fully understand its interactions with UV-damaged DNA or other NER proteins due to two major challenges. The first challenge is that unlike for many NER proteins, the abundance of endogenous PARP-1 in the nucleus makes it nearly impossible to visualize its dynamics of recruitment to UV-damaged DNA in situ using conventional immunocytological methods. T...