Proper replication and maintenance of the eukaryotic genome requires the involvement of the scaffolding protein TOP BP1. Over the last 20 years, studies in yeast, frog, and mammals have revealed conserved roles for TOP BP1 in initiation of DNA replication and activation of DNA damage signaling. TOP BP1 has been shown to assemble ternary protein complexes necessary to jump-start DNA replication or to initiate DNA damage signaling events by recognizing distinct phosphoproteins via its multiple BRCA1 C terminus (BRCT) domains (Fig. 1 D ;Wardlaw et al., 2014). In this issue, Moudry et al. add to the list of crucial TOP BP1 roles in genome biology and reveal that TOP BP1 is also required for proper repair of double strand breaks (DSBs) by homologous recombination (HR). Moudry et al. (2016) report that depletion of TOP BP1 makes cells highly sensitive to the poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase inhibitor olaparib, a drug known to sensitize cells with an already dysfunctional HR machinery. In particular, olaparib hypersensitizes cells that carry mutations in the bona fide HR factors and tumor suppressors BRCA1 or BRCA2. In this work, the authors first identified TOP BP1 as a hit in a high-content RNAi screen for proteins whose depletion resulted in higher toxicity after olaparib treatment in osteosarcoma cells, which suggests that loss or inactivation of TOP BP1 predicts the response of cancer cells to this drug. Moudry et al. (2016) observed that RNAi-mediated knockdown of TOP BP1 in cancer cells treated with olaparib increased the level of DNA damage and induced DNA DSB markers. The researchers subsequently examined whether olaparib sensitivity reflected defective HR in TOP BP1-depleted cells by measuring HR activity through several parameters and confirmed that TOP BP1-depleted cells showed reduced HR activity.The HR process encompasses several phases, including end resection and chromatin loading of RPA and RAD51, which can be visualized by formation of microscopically detectable foci. Moudry et al. (2016) searched for which step of HR was compromised in cells depleted for TOP BP1 and found that DNA end resection, i.e., the processing of the 5′ recessed end that exposes a 3′ overhang used for homology search, seemed not to be affected, as evaluated by the amounts of single stranded DNA detected by BrdU incorporation under nondenaturing conditions. Interestingly, they found that the next key stage in HR, in which the RAD51 recombinase protein is loaded at these 3′ overhangs (Fig. 1 A), was greatly impaired, based on the assessment of the formation of RAD51 foci by microscopy and of the biochemical analysis of RAD51 accumulation on chromatin. Although the mechanism by which TOP BP1 promotes the loading of RAD51 remains unclear, the authors propose an interesting model in which TOP BP1 plays a scaffolding role to direct Polo-like Kinase 1 (PLK1), which phosphorylates RAD51 and facilitates its loading to DNA damage sites (Fig. 1 A; Yata et al., 2012). Consistent with this model, they show that TOP BP1 physically interacts with...