Paul L. Modrich

Last updated

Paul Modrich
Paul L. Modrich 0116.jpg
Paul L. Modrich in December 2015
Born
Paul Lawrence Modrich

(1946-06-13) June 13, 1946 (age 78)
Alma mater MIT
Stanford University (PhD)
Known forClarification of cellular resistance to carcinogens
Modrich–Lehman unit
Awards
Scientific career
Fields DNA mismatch repair
Institutions
Thesis Structure, mechanism and biological role of E. coli DNA ligase  (1973)
Doctoral advisor Robert Lehman
Website scholars.duke.edu/person/modrich

Paul Lawrence Modrich (born June 13, 1946) is an American biochemist, James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is known for his research on DNA mismatch repair. [1] Modrich received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015, jointly with Aziz Sancar and Tomas Lindahl. [2] [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Paul Modrich presenting himself

Modrich was born on June 13, 1946, in Raton, New Mexico to Laurence Modrich and Margaret McTurk. [4] He has a younger brother Dave. [5] His father was a biology teacher and coach for basketball, football and tennis at Raton High School where he graduated in 1964. [5] Modrich is of Croatian, Montenegrin, German and Scottish (Gaelic) [6] origin. His paternal grandfather, of Croatian descent, [7] is probably from the small village of Modrići near Zadar, [8] and grandmother of Montenegrin descent, both immigrated to the United States from coastal Croatia in the late 19th century. [4] [9] His maternal family is of mixed German and Scotch-Irish descent. [4] Modrich married fellow scientist Vickers Burdett in 1980. [10]

Modrich obtained a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 and subsequently a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1973. He continued his research as a postdoc in the lab of Charles C. Richardson at Harvard Medical School for a year (1973–1974). [4]

Research

Modrich became an assistant professor at the chemistry department of University of California, Berkeley in 1974. [4] He joined Duke University's faculty in 1976 and has been a Howard Hughes Investigator since 1995. He works primarily on strand-directed mismatch repair. His lab demonstrated how DNA mismatch repair serves as a copyeditor to prevent errors from DNA polymerase. Matthew Meselson previously proposed the existence of recognition of mismatches. Modrich performed biochemical experiments to study mismatch repair in E. coli. [11] They later searched for proteins associated with mismatch repair in humans. [1]

Honors and awards

Honors and awards received by Modrich include: [12]

Modrich is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frederick Sanger</span> British biochemist (1918–2013)

Frederick Sanger was a British biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Smith (chemist)</span> British-born Canadian biochemist, businessman and Nobel Prize laureate (1932–2000)

Michael Smith was a British-born Canadian biochemist and businessman. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kary Mullis for his work in developing site-directed mutagenesis. Following a PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester, he undertook postdoctoral research with Har Gobind Khorana at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Subsequently, Smith worked at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver before being appointed a professor of biochemistry in the UBC Faculty of Medicine in 1966. Smith's career included roles as the founding director of the UBC Biotechnology Laboratory and the founding scientific leader of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence (PENCE). In 1996 he was named Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of Biotechnology. Subsequently, he became the founding director of the Genome Sequencing Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cancer Research UK</span> Cancer research and awareness charity

Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is the world's largest independent cancer research organisation. It is registered as a charity in the United Kingdom and Isle of Man, and was formed on 4 February 2002 by the merger of The Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. Cancer Research UK conducts research using both its own staff and grant-funded researchers. It also provides information about cancer and runs campaigns aimed at raising awareness and influencing public policy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Berg</span> American biochemist (1926–2023)

Paul Berg was an American biochemist and professor at Stanford University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Cech</span> American biochemist

Thomas Robert Cech is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, suggesting that life might have started as RNA. He found that RNA can not only transmit instructions, but that it can act as a speed up the necessary reactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miroslav Radman</span> Croatian biologist

Miroslav Radman is a Croatian biologist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aziz Sancar</span> Turkish biochemist and molecular biologist (born 1946)

Aziz Sancar is a Turkish molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and circadian clock. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He has made contributions on photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria that have changed his field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">London Research Institute</span> Biological research facility

The Cancer Research UK London Research Institute (LRI) was a biological research facility which conducted research into the basic biology of cancer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carolyn Bertozzi</span> American chemist (born 1966)

Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi is an American chemist and Nobel laureate, known for her wide-ranging work spanning both chemistry and biology. She coined the term "bioorthogonal chemistry" for chemical reactions compatible with living systems. Her recent efforts include synthesis of chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and how they affect diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections like COVID-19. At Stanford University, she holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Bertozzi is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and is the former director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Richard D. Wood is an American molecular biologist specializing in research on DNA repair and mutation. He is known for pioneering studies on nucleotide excision repair (NER), particularly for reconstituting the minimum set of proteins involved in this process, identifying proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) as part of the NER complex and identifying mammalian repair polymerases.

Deoxyribonuclease IV (phage-T4-induced) is catalyzes the degradation nucleotides in DsDNA by attacking the 5'-terminal end.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Y. Tsien</span> American biochemist and Nobel laureate (1952–2016)

Roger Yonchien Tsien was an American biochemist. He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, in collaboration with organic chemist Osamu Shimomura and neurobiologist Martin Chalfie. Tsien was also a pioneer of calcium imaging.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graham C. Walker</span>

Graham Charles Walker is an American biologist, notable for his work explicating the structure and function of proteins involved in DNA repair and mutagenesis, with applications for cancer, and for understanding rhizobium (bacterial) functions that infect plants and mammals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tomas Lindahl</span> Swedish-British scientist

Tomas Robert Lindahl is a Swedish-British scientist specialising in cancer research. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with American chemist Paul L. Modrich and Turkish chemist Aziz Sancar for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nobel Prize in Chemistry</span> One of the five Nobel Prizes established in 1895 by Alfred Nobel

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. This award is administered by the Nobel Foundation, and awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on proposal of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry which consists of five members elected by the Academy. The award is presented in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel's death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francis Crick Institute</span> Biomedical research centre in London

The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical research centre in London, which was established in 2010 and opened in 2016. The institute is a partnership between Cancer Research UK, Imperial College London, King's College London (KCL), the Medical Research Council, University College London (UCL) and the Wellcome Trust. The institute has 1,500 staff, including 1,250 scientists, and an annual budget of over £100 million, making it the biggest single biomedical laboratory in Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Betzig</span> American physicist

Robert Eric Betzig is an American physicist who works as a professor of physics and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a senior fellow at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia.

Nikola Panayot Pavletich is the former chair of structural biology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">I. Robert Lehman</span> American biochemist (born 1924)

Israel Robert Lehman is a Lithuanian-born American biochemist. His work primarily focused on the study of DNA replication and repair, as well as the replication of phages and the herpes virus. Notably, he collaborated with Arthur Konrberg in the discovery of DNA polymerase and the reaction responsible for genetic material replication. He also made major contributions in characterizing the process of homologous recombination. He served as the head of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University from 1974 to 1979 and again from 1984 to 1986. Lehman was awarded the Merk Prize by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

References

  1. 1 2 "Paul Modrich Awarded 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry". HHMI. HHMI. October 7, 2015. Retrieved December 13, 2015.
  2. Broad, William J. (October 7, 2015). "Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for DNA Studies". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved December 13, 2015.
  3. Staff (October 7, 2015). "THE NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY 2015 – DNA repair – providing chemical stability for life" (PDF). Nobel Prize . Retrieved December 13, 2015.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "Paul Modrich – Biographical". nobelprize.org. Retrieved November 16, 2016.
  5. 1 2 Simonich, Milan (October 8, 2015). "Childhood in Raton helped shape life of Nobel winner in chemistry". The Taos News. Retrieved October 9, 2016.[ permanent dead link ]
  6. Last name: McTurk
  7. "Plenkovic welcomed an American Nobel Prize winner of Croatian origin who is responsible for one of the most important discoveries in medicine history: This was Modrich's first visit to the homeland of his ancestors". International Society for Applied Biological Sciences. Retrieved December 5, 2020.
  8. "Večer S Nobelovcima – Nobel Spirit 2 (ISABS 2019)". YouTube. Hrvatska radiotelevizija & Dragan Primorac. Archived from the original on December 15, 2021. Retrieved June 19, 2019. ...my wife and I, we visited the village yesterday where my grandparent, grandfather may have been born, Modrići, I believe it is called
  9. Nenad Jarić Dauenhauer (October 26, 2015). "Nobelovac Modrich za tportal: Djed mi je bio Hrvat" [Nobel laureate Modrich for tportal: My grandfather was a Croat]. tportal.hr. T-Hrvatski Telekom . Retrieved December 13, 2015.
  10. "For Paul Modrich, frenzy and failures yield truths". News & Observer. Retrieved October 9, 2016.
  11. Su, SS; Modrich, P (July 1986). "Escherichia coli mutS-encoded protein binds to mismatched DNA base pairs". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 83 (14): 5057–61. Bibcode:1986PNAS...83.5057S. doi: 10.1073/pnas.83.14.5057 . PMC   323889 . PMID   3014530.
  12. "Paul L. Modrich (PhD '73)". Stanford Medicine Alumni Association. Retrieved November 30, 2018.