The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar.
Lindahl, 77, is an emeritus group leader at the Francis Crick Institute and Emeritus director of Cancer Research UK at Clare Hall Laboratory in Britain. Both from North Carolina, Modrich, 69, is an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University School of Medicine while Sancar, 69, is a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.
According to the Nobel Prize official website, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. They won the prestigious honor for their scientific discoveries revealing the ways in which our DNA is at once extremely flimsy and flexible.
The prize money of 8 million Swedish kronor ($970,000) will be shared among the winners. The Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2015 provided the fundamental insights into how cells function, the information and data that can be used, for instance, in the development of new treatments for life- threatening ailments like cancer.
Every individual's development begins when 23 chromosomes from a sperm unite with 23 chromosomes from an egg. These chromosomes are made up of chemical strands called DNA that carry genetic information. They fundamentally contain recipes for proteins to produce the wide variety of traits that create an individual.
DNA also called the building blocks of life. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, DNAs were believed to be extremely steady. How else could DNA be passed down from generation to generation? Scientists concluded that human evolution must have selected for powerful molecules because if gene molecules are fragile, no complex organism could possibly continue to exist.
Lindahl FRS FMedSci, a Swedish scientist specializing in cancer research began to question the conventional theory and as a postdoc student at Princeton and later at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, he carried out a series of experiments showing that DNA molecules, when isolated outside of the cell, actually degraded rapidly.
Their work uncovered the mechanisms used by cells to repair damaged DNA, a fundamental process in living cells and important in cancer.
"Cigarette smoke contains small reactive chemicals, which bind to the DNA and prevent it from being replicated properly, so they are mutagens. And once there is damage in the DNA this can cause diseases, including cancer," Prof. Lindahl said in a statement obtained by BBC.
Sancar is a biochemist and molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and the circadian clock. He has mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA. His longest-running study has involved photolyase and the mechanisms of photoreactivation. Sancar is the second Turkish Nobel laureate after Orhan Pamuk, who is also an alumnus of Istanbul University.
Modrich has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Duke University since 1994 working on strand-directed mismatch repair. His lab demonstrated how DNA mismatch repair serves as a copyeditor to prevent errors from DNA polymerase. He has demonstrated how the cell corrects errors that occur when DNA is replicated during cell division.