Aziz Sancar

Aziz Sancar is a Turkish-American biochemist whose research clarified how cells repair damaged DNA. He shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.

Thomas Lindahl: A Swedish biochemist who discovered that DNA undergoes spontaneous decay and characterized base-excision repair. He shared the 2015 Nobel Prize with Sancar for a distinct DNA-repair mechanism.
Nucleotide excision repair: A DNA-repair pathway that removes a short stretch of nucleotides containing bulky damage. Sancar elucidated its bacterial mechanism, including damage recognition, incision, and repair synthesis.
Savur: A town in southeastern Turkey, in Mardin Province. Sancar was born in Savur in 1946.
Skin cancer: A group of cancers arising from skin cells, often associated with ultraviolet radiation exposure. Failure to repair ultraviolet-induced DNA damage can contribute to mutations that promote these cancers.
Paul Modrich: An American biochemist who elucidated the mechanism of DNA mismatch repair. He shared the 2015 Nobel Prize with Sancar for research on another repair pathway.
Photolyase: An enzyme that uses light energy to reverse certain forms of ultraviolet-induced DNA damage. Sancar characterized photolyases and their light-dependent repair of DNA lesions.
Istanbul University: A public research university in Istanbul, Turkey. Sancar earned his medical degree there in 1969.
Circadian rhythm: A roughly 24-hour biological cycle that regulates processes in organisms. Sancar’s laboratory also investigated how circadian rhythms affect DNA repair and chemotherapy response.
Claes Gustafsson: A Swedish molecular biologist known for research on gene regulation and Nobel Prize selection. He chaired the Nobel Committee for Chemistry when Sancar received the 2015 award.
Thymine dimer: A covalent bond between adjacent thymine bases, commonly induced by ultraviolet radiation. This lesion is a key substrate of photolyase and nucleotide excision repair.

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