Meet The Winners Of The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015

The press release....

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry for 2015 to Tomas Lindahl Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory, Hertfordshire, UK Paul Modrich.


Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine,
Durham, NC, USA and Aziz Sancar.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA “for mechanistic studies of DNA repair"

The cells’ toolbox for DNA repair
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 is awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul
Modrich and Aziz Sancar for having mapped, at a molecular level, how cells
repair damaged DNA and safeguard the genetic information. Their work has
provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for
instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments.
Each day our DNA is damaged by UV radiation, free radicals and other
carcinogenic substances, but even without such external attacks, a DNA
molecule is inherently unstable. Thousands of spontaneous changes to a
cell’s genome occur on a daily basis.

 Furthermore, defects can also arise when DNA is copied during cell division, a process that occurs several million times every day in the human body.
The reason our genetic material does not disintegrate into complete
chemical chaos is that a host of molecular systems continuously monitor
and repair DNA. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 awards three pioneering
scientists who have mapped how several of these repair systems function
at a detailed molecular level.

In the early 1970s, scientists believed that DNA was an extremely stable
molecule, but Tomas Lindahl demonstrated that DNA decays at a rate that
ought to have made the development of life on Earth impossible. This
insight led him to discover a molecular machinery, base excision repair,
which constantly counteracts the collapse of our DNA.

Aziz Sancar has mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that
cells use to repair UV damage to DNA. People born with defects in this
repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight. The
cell also utilises nucleotide excision repair to correct defects caused by
mutagenic substances, among other things.

Paul Modrich has demonstrated how the cell corrects errors that occur
when DNA is replicated during cell division. This mechanism, mismatch
repair, reduces the error frequency during DNA replication by about a
thousandfold.

Congenital defects in mismatch repair are known, for example, to cause a hereditary variant of colon cancer.

The Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2015 have provided fundamental insights
into how cells function, knowledge that can be used, for instance, in the
development of new cancer treatments.

Tomas Lindahl, Swedish citizen. Born 1938 in Stockholm, Sweden. Ph.D.
1967 from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Professor of Medical
and Physiological Chemistry at University of Gothenburg 1978–82.
Emeritus group leader at Francis Crick Institute and Emeritus director of
Cancer Research UK at Clare Hall Laboratory, Hertfordshire, UK.

Paul Modrich, U.S. citizen. Born 1946. Ph.D. 1973 from Stanford
University, Stanford, CA, USA. Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical
Institute and James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University
School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA.

Aziz Sancar, U.S. and Turkish citizen. Born 1946 in Savur, Turkey. Ph.D.
1977 from University of Texas, Dallas, TX, USA. Sarah Graham Kenan
Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of North Carolina
School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

Prize amount: 8 million Swedish krona, to be shared equally between the
laureates.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, founded in 1739, is an
independent organisation whose overall objective is to promote the
sciences and strengthen their influence in society. The Academy takes
special responsibility for the natural sciences and mathematics, but
endeavours to promote the exchange of ideas between various disciplines.