DNA repair studies win Chemistry Nobel Prize

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for their discoveries in DNA repair.

The trio have mapped, at a molecular level, the way a cell repairs its DNA and safeguards the genetic information. Their work has made a fundamental contribution to the understanding of how living cells function, as well as providing knowledge about the molecular causes of several diseases.

In the early 1970s, scientists believed that DNA was an extremely stable molecule, but Tomas Lindahl, director of Cancer Research UK at Clare Hall Laboratory in Hertfordshire, demonstrated that DNA undergoes a slow but noticeable decay. Later, he pieced together a molecular image of how base excision repair functions showing for the first time that a cell mechanism can repair damaged DNA.

Aziz Sancar from the University of North Carolina in the US mapped nucleotide excision repair - the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA - and showed that the defects of this repair can lead to skin cancer if an individual is exposed to sunlight.

Paul Modrich from Stanford University in the US demonstrated how cells correct errors that occur when DNA is replicated during cell division. He showed that this mechanism - mismatch repair - reduces the error frequency during DNA replication by a thousand times. The defects in this type of repair are known to cause a type 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.

The 8 million SEK (£0.6 million) prize will be shared equally between the trio.

The awards were established in the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, and first awarded in 1901. 106 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry have been awarded to 169 Laureates between 1901 and 2014, including four women. Only one person, Frederick Sanger, has been awarded the Chemistry Prize twice, in 1958 and in 1980.

More information:  http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2015/popular-chemistryprize2015.pdf