The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors DNA repair studies

On October 7, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences declared the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The prize was awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar for “having mapped, at a molecular level, how cells repair damaged DNA and safeguard the genetic information.”

Lindahl, a Swedish scientist, discovered base excision repair, a kind of molecular machinery that constantly counteracts the breakdown of our DNA. Modrich, an American researcher, enabled the understanding of mismatch repair, which refers to the ways in which the cell corrects errors that occur when DNA is replicated during cell division. Sancar, a U.S. and Turkish researcher, has mapped the mechanism nucleotide excision repair that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA.

The trio was awarded the Nobel Prize because of their contribution in providing “fundamental insights into how cells function, knowledge that can be used, for instance, in the development of new cancer treatments.”

Congratulations to the winners!