DNA Repair Research Nets Chemistry Nobel For 3 Scientists

Three scientists from the US, Sweden, and Turkey won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry by discovering how cells repair damaged DNA.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Tuesday (10/6/15), will be given to Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo and Arthur McDonald of Canada’s Queen’s University for their work in helping to resolve a puzzle that had scientists stumped for decades. To explain better, the molecule is in fact fairly robust against such molecular failure, but exists in a constant state of damage and repair.

Modrich earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University and now works at Duke University’s School of Medicine; Sancar earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas and currently teaches in the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

Sancar, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, mapped the process known as “nucleotide excision repair”, which is how cells repair ultraviolet damage to DNA.

DNA is fundamental to life: it is the physical method through which evolution works, and the means by which most living creatures store their genetic information and pass it on to their descendants.

Some research into developing new cancer drugs is based on the idea of sabotaging the DNA repair that keeps cancer cells alive.

Lindahl is an emeritus group leader at Francis Crick Institute and Emeritus director of Cancer Research UK at Clare Hall Laboratory in Britain.

Sancar, the first Turkish-born scientist to win the prize, said it would prompt big celebrations his native land.

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, “Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments”.

He is the second Turk to win a Nobel Prize, after novelist Orhan Pamuk was awarded the literature prize in 2006.

The DNA research – done independently by the three winners – describes how cells repair damaged DNA.

In the early 1970s, Lindahl defied orthodoxy about DNA stability by showing that the complex molecule, on its own, would deteriorate so rapidly that life on Earth would have been impossible. This insight led him to discover a molecular machinery, which constantly counteracts the collapse of our DNA, according to the statement.

Ironically, the same repair mechanism identified by the Nobel laureates can also cause cancerous cell to resist the effects of cancer treatment. This mechanism, mismatch repair, reduces the error frequency during DNA replication by about a thousandfold.

Chemistry was the third of this year’s Nobel prizes. This research will also give us new ways to develop treatments for a wide range of diseases – especially cancer. Paul Modrich demonstrated another mechanism, called “mismatch repair”, through which cells correct these transcription errors.

Niels de Wind, a geneticist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, says “all of these lesions have to be repaired… if they are not repaired, they will cause cancer and aging”.

“The basic research carried out by the 2015 Nobel laureates in chemistry has not only deepened our knowledge of how we function, but could also lead to the development of lifesaving treatments”, the Nobel committee said.