Nobel prize for chemistry: Lindahl, Modrich and Sancar win for DNA repair research

[muriel_volestrangler]

The Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for their research into the mechanisms that cells use to repair DNA.

The three scientists, from Sweden, the USA and Turkey respectively, received an equal share of the prestigious 8m Swedish kronor (£631,000) award for “mechanistic studies of DNA repair”. Their research mapped and explained how the cell repairs its DNA in order to prevent errors occurring in genetic information.

Announcing the prize in Stockholm, Göran K Hansson, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said: “This year’s prize about the cell’s tool box for repairing DNA”.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/07/lindahl-modrich-and-sancar-win-nobel-chemistry-prize-for-dna-research

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 awards three pioneering scientists who have mapped how several of these repair systems function at a detailed molecular level.

In the early 1970s, scientists believed that DNA was an extremely stable molecule, but Tomas Lindahl demonstrated that DNA decays at a rate that ought to have made the development of life on Earth impossible. This insight led him to discover a molecular machinery, base excision repair, which constantly counteracts the collapse of our DNA.

Aziz Sancar has mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA. People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight. The cell also utilises nucleotide excision repair to correct defects caused by mutagenic substances, among other things.

Paul Modrich has demonstrated how the 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. Congenital defects in mismatch repair are known, for example, to cause a hereditary variant of colon cancer.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2015/oct/07/nobel-prize-for-chemistry-announcement-live#block-5614ec21e4b00320808ee8ec

[longship]

1. R&K for science Nobel prizes! nt

[Moostache]

2. K&R...because THIS is more important that much of what gets Rec'd...

We need to pay attention to the consequential, champion the vital and ignore the clown car coverage.

Its time to stop pretending that everyone is going to make it through the coming century. Only the smart and the strong will survive and the smartest will be those who understand HOW and WHY things happen, not those who get caught up in feelings or emotions alone.