2015 Nobel Prize Winners: Lindahl, Sancar, and Modrich

Göran K Hansson, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said: “This year’s prize is about the cell’s tool box for repairing DNA.” Together, the repair mechanisms discovered by Lindahl, Sancar and Modrich fix thousands of DNA faults caused by UV rays, cigarette smoke, and other toxic substances. They are constantly at work to repair copying errors as cells divide. Without these repair mechanisms, the genomes would be riddled with errors, and cancer would be rife. (A)

PROCESS:

Lindahl, Modrich, and Sancar were honored for mapping and explaining how cells repair their DNA and safeguard genetic information. They worked out how cells repair faults that inevitably occur when DNA is copied several times allowing for mutations to arise under a wide variety of environmental factors such as UV rays in sunlight that could inevitably result in skin cancer.

Lindahl searched for enzymes that would repair faulty genetic material, focusing on the weaknesses of the DNA letters paired up. Cytosine pairs only with Guanine, however when Cytosine loses an amino group- it pairs up with Adenine instead. This error in pairing in the stands cultivates a mutation the next time it is copied. He realized that cells MUST have a way to protect themselves from this and in 1974 Lindahl published the details of the enzyme responsible. (A)

Aziz Sancar

Born: 1946, Savur, Turkey

Affiliation at the time of the award: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Prize motivation: "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair"

Prize share: 1/3

Paul Modrich

Born: 1946

Affiliation at the time of the award: Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Durham, NC, USA, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA

Prize motivation: "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair"

Prize share: 1/3

Tomas Lindahl

Born: 1938, Stockholm, Sweden

Affiliation at the time of the award: Francis Crick Institute, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, Clare Hall Laboratory, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

Prize motivation: "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair"

Prize share: 1/3 

CONCLUSION: 

The committee stated that, “Their systematic work has made a decisive contribution to the understanding of how the living cell functions, as well as providing knowledge about the molecular causes of several hereditary diseases and about mechanisms behind both cancer development and ageing,” adding,  “All chemical processes are prone to random errors. Additionally, your DNA is subjected on a daily basis to damaging radiation and reactive molecules. In fact, you ought to have been a chemical chaos long before you even developed into a foetus." (A)

LINKS:

(A) http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/07/lindahl-modrich-and-sancar-win-nobel-chemistry-prize-for-dna-research

(B) nobelprize.org