The ensemble of these findings suggest that a CT-based detection of 8oxoG in chromatin is possible, and relies on the differences in DNA redox chemistry between natural and defect containing system, regardless of the exact defect position within the NCP and the presence or absence of specific DNA-protein interactions. Furthermore, the lack of measurable structural changes at the NCP-level due to the 8oxoG oxidative lesion suggests that structural properties alone are not reliable indicators of DNA damage. The findings reported herein, highlighted by the relative differences of almost 1 eV in ∆A R→O , strongly indicate that detection of 8oxoG via a DNA-mediated hole transfer scheme as proposed by Barton and coworkers is also possible within the NCP, with the two BER enzymes likely being bound to different linker DNA fragments and scanning packed DNA between them. While the redoxbased detection of oxidative defects seems unaffected in packed DNA, the overall repair process might be less efficient as the efficiency of 8oxoG removal is experimentally reported to decrease if it occurs in a buried NCP regions. Still, our findings suggest that this decrease in efficiency should not be attributed to the detection scheme, since ∆A R→O decreases equally in both NCP regions considered here, and the detection of 8oxoG would thus be just as efficient. Instead, the decrease in 8oxoG removal efficiency is more likely due to the repair process, because of the inaccessibility of buried NCP regions to binding by repair enzymes.