The Nobel Prize 2015 in Chemistry jointly went to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2015 was awarded for mechanistic studies of DNA repair. The award was jointly given to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar.
About Mr. Lindahl
- Mr. Lindahl is from the Francis Crick Institute.
- He 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.
- Mr. Lindahl is also the 29th Nobel Laureate born in Sweden.
About Mr. Modrich
- Mr. Modrich is from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine.
- He 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.
About Mr. Sancar
- Mr. Sancar is from the University of North Carolina.
- He 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.
Contribution of the three Scientists
According to the press release by the Nobel Institute, “Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments.”
The winners will share the 8 million Swedish kronor (about $960,000) prize money. Each winner will also get a diploma and a gold medal at the annual award ceremony on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel.
