On Wednesday, October 7, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it had decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2015 to Tomas Lindahl (Sweden, UK), Paul Modrich (USA) and Aziz Sancar (Turkey, USA) 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 monetary prize of $970,000 will be shared equally amongst the three new Nobel Laureates. Each day our DNA is damaged by UV radiation, free radicals, and other carcinogenic substances, but even without such external attacks, a DNA molecule is inherently unstable. Thousands of spontaneous changes to a cell’s genome occur on a daily basis. Furthermore, defects can also arise when DNA is copied during cell division, a process that occurs several million times every day in the human body. The reason our genetic material does not disintegrate into complete chemical chaos is that a host of molecular systems continuously monitor and repair DNA. 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, Ph.D., 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, Ph.D., 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.Login Or Register To Read Full Story