Paul Modrich | |
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Born | Paul Lawrence Modrich June 13, 1946 Raton, New Mexico, U.S. |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | MIT Stanford University (PhD) |
Known for | Clarification of cellular resistance to carcinogens |
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 | www |
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]
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]
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 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.
The Nobel Prize in Physics is a yearly award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions for humankind in the field of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901, the others being the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Physics is traditionally the first award presented in the Nobel Prize ceremony.
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DNA mismatch repair (MMR) is a system for recognizing and repairing erroneous insertion, deletion, and mis-incorporation of bases that can arise during DNA replication and recombination, as well as repairing some forms of DNA damage.
Miroslav Radman is a Croatian biologist.
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.
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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.
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Brian Kent Kobilka is an American physiologist and a recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Lefkowitz for discoveries that reveal the workings of G protein-coupled receptors. He is currently a professor in the department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also a co-founder of ConfometRx, a biotechnology company focusing on G protein-coupled receptors. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
Tomas Robert Lindahl FRS FMedSci 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.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a Nobel in the sciences. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
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...my wife and I, we visited the village yesterday where my grandparent, grandfather may have been born, Modrići, I believe it is called