2015 Nobel Prizes - Nobel Prize in Chemistry for DNA repair studies Wednesday Oct 07,2015

The Nobel Prize 2015 in Chemistry jointly went to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar

The Nobel was awarded “for mechanistic studies of DNA repair”

Tomas Lindahl is from the Francis Crick Institute. "He 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," said the Nobel Institute in a statement.
Tomas Lindahl is also the 29th Nobel Laureate born in Sweden.

Paul Modrich is from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine. "He 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," added the release.

Aziz. Sancar is from the University of North Carolina. "He has mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA. People born with defects in this repair sstem 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," said the release.

"Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments," said the press release.

The winners will share the 8 million Swedish kronor (about $960,000) prize money. 

Each winner will also get a diploma and a gold medal at the annual award ceremony on Dec. 10, 2015 the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel. 

The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1901 to Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff of the Netherlands, "for his discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions."

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 was awarded jointly to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".