In recent years, a number of groundbreaking structural and mechanistic studies deepened our understanding of helicase mechanisms and established new approaches for their analyses. Many fundamental mechanistic questions ranging from the mechanism of force generation, mechanochemical coupling to distinct mechanisms by which the same enzyme translocates on DNA removing obstacles, unwinds DNA and/or remodels nucleoprotein complexes, however, remain to be answered. It is even less understood how the helicase motors are incorporated into a wide range of genome maintenance and repair machines.