Nobel Prize for Chemistry Awarded to 3 Scientists for DNA Repair Studies

The 2015 Nobel Prize for chemistry has been jointly awarded to three scientists for their "mechanistic studies of DNA repair," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Wednesday. Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar won "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," the academy said.
The organization tweeted graphics explaining the scientists' work.
Lindahl, a Swedish scientist, showed that "DNA decays at a rate that ought to have made the development of life on Earth impossible," the academy said.
"This insight led him to discover a molecular machinery, base excision repair, which constantly counteracts the collapse of our DNA."
Modrich, an American, showed how a 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," the academy said.
"Congenital defects in mismatch repair are known, for example, to cause a hereditary variant of colon cancer."
Sancar, a U.S. and Turkish citizen, mapped nucleotide excision repair -- the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA, the academy said.
"People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight, it said.