Showing posts with label Nobel Prize. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nobel Prize. Show all posts


Tomas Lindahl - Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory, Hertfordshire, UK

Tomas Lindahl

Paul Modrich - Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA
Paul Modrich
Aziz Sancar - University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

“for mechanistic studies of DNA repair"

The cells’ toolbox for DNA repair

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 is 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. Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments.
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 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.

The Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2015 have provided fundamental insights into how cells function, knowledge that can be used, for instance, in the development of new cancer treatments.



Courtesy by www.nobelprize.org


October 8th, The winners for the Nobel medal in Chemistry is likely to be announced and thanks to the Thomson and Reuters, who already have their winners prediction list for 2014.
As usual, Thomson Reuters have released their Nobel forecast, which uses citation numbers and other statistical wizardry to predict the winners in each category. This approach has successfully predicted 35 Nobel prize winners over the past 12 years.


The Intellectual Property & Science unit of Thomson Reuters, which also owns the Reuters news service, bases its forecasts on the number of citations of a scientist's published work. These references serve as a proxy for how influential their work is. (This is also how the overall influence and importance of journals and scientists is assessed, a system that is not without its critics.)
The ratings have accurately predicted 35 Nobel laureates since 2002. These include 9 winners predicted in the year of the forecast, and 16 who won within 2 years. Here are this years predictions for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry:

FOR THEIR INVENTION OF THE ORGANIC LIGHT EMITTING DIODE 


Ching W. Tang
Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY USA, and Bank of East Asia Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, CHINA
 
Steven Van Slyke
Chief Technology Officer, Kateeva, Menlo Park, CA USA

STARS OF THE SCREEN(S)

Today, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDS) are everywhere: TVs, mobile phones, tablets, game consoles, and digital cameras. They all owe a debt to the work of Chin Tang and Steven Van Slyke, formerly employed by the Eastman Kodak research laboratories at Rochester, NY. There they experimented with the kinds of organic molecules that respond to an electric charge by emitting visible light. Tang and Van Slyke published their research in a paper now regarded as the one that initiated a sea change in electroluminescence. In it they revealed how the right combination of organic chemicals could generate useful light without using much electricity.

Their paper was published in 1987 (Applied Physics Letters, 51 [12]: 913-5) and has been cited more than 9,100 times. A year previously, Tang had published a paper in the same journal (48 [2]: 183-5) in which he reported a two-layer organic photovoltaic cell (this report has been cited more than 2,700 times), and other well-cited papers were to follow. The 1986 paper was an inspirational piece of work, coming not from a university or national institute, but from a commercial organization.


FOR DESIGN OF FUNCTIONAL MESOPOROUS MATERIALS 


Charles T. Kresge
Chief Technology Officer, Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, SAUDI ARABIA 

Ryong Ryoo
Director, Center for Nanomaterials and Chemical Reactions, Institute for Basic Science, and Distinguished Professor, Department of Chemistry, Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIST), Daejon, SOUTH KOREA 

Galen D. Stucky
E. Khashoggi Industries, LLC Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Materials Department, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA USA
Description:

There are micro-, meso- and macro-porous materials, respectively defined as having pore sizes less than 2 nanometers (micro), between 2 and 50 nm (meso), and greater than 50 nm (macro). The ability to create mesoporous materials, of silicates, silica, or carbon, led to remarkable applications because of their large internal surface areas of up to 1000 m2/g, making them useful as supports for catalysts, for bio-sensors, for imaging, and for selectively separating mixtures.


Naturally occurring mesoporous materials include minerals such as the zeolites. These aluminum silicates have been used for many years and are referred to as molecular sieves. Useful as they are in trapping small molecules like water and metal ions, they are of limited application because of their small pore size. Kresge was the first to show that they could be made in the laboratory and with pores of various sizes. He published his results in Nature (359: 710-2, 1992), a paper that has been cited more than 11,500 times.


FOR DEVELOPMENT OF THE REVERSIBLE ADDITION-FRAGMENTATION CHAIN TRANSFER (RAFT) POLYMERIZATION PROCESS 


Graeme Moad
Chief Research Scientist , CSIRO, Clayton, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 

Ezio Rizzardo
CSIRO Fellow, CSIRO, Clayton, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 

San H. Thang
Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO, Clayton, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 
Description:

POLYMERS SYNTHESIZED TO ORDER

Polymers such as polyacrylate, polyacrylonitrile, polystyrene, and polyvinyl acetate make up many of products that we encounter every day. They are produced by a process known as radical polymerization, which involves a simple monomer molecule accepting an electron to form a free radical which then reacts with a second molecule, and this then repeats the process, so the polymer chain grows until it meets a unit that can terminate the process, such as another free radical. Several factors control this process, so it is perhaps not surprising that the chain length of the product can vary greatly.

Although such polymers have been around for 70 years or more, their chemistry took a major step forward in the 1990s thanks to three chemists working at one of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) centers, at Clayton, Melbourne, in the state of Victoria. The paper which revealed their breakthrough was published inMacromolecules (31: 5559-62, 1998) and has been cited more than 2,700 times.


Google Hangout by C&EN and Noble Prize committee...