The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three researchers for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair:
- Tomas Lindahl (Francis Crick Institute, UK) for discovery of base excision repair, which counteracts damage to DNA bases;
- Paul Modrich (HHMI and Duke University) for demonstrating mismatch repair, which occurs during DNA replication; and
- Aziz Sancar (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for mapping nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism cells use to repair UV damage to DNA.
One of the key papers from Modrich was published in the GSA journal GENETICS.
Pukkila, P. J., Peterson, J., Herman, G., Modrich, P., & Meselson, M. (1983). Effects of high levels of DNA adenine methylation on methyl-directed mismatch repair in Escherichia coli. GENETICS, 104(4), 571-582.
Additional Information:
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015, October 7, 2015.