Tomas Lindahl

Tomas Lindahl is a Swedish biochemist who showed that DNA undergoes spontaneous chemical decay and helped establish the field of DNA repair.

Base excision repair: A DNA repair pathway that removes damaged or inappropriate bases and replaces them with correct nucleotides. Lindahl established its key steps, showing how cells repair chemically altered DNA bases.
Francis Crick: A British molecular biologist who helped discover the double-helix structure of DNA and formulate the central dogma. Lindahl challenged the assumption of DNA stability associated with the early molecular-biology era.
Aziz Sancar: A Turkish-American biochemist who mapped mechanisms of nucleotide excision repair and photolyase-mediated repair. He shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Lindahl for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.
Mutation: A heritable change in the nucleotide sequence of genetic material. Unrepaired spontaneous DNA damage can become a mutation when DNA is copied.
Nucleotide excision repair: A DNA repair pathway that removes bulky lesions by excising a short stretch of the damaged strand. Unlike Lindahl’s base excision pathway, it removes damaged nucleotides within a larger DNA segment.
DNA glycosylase: An enzyme that recognizes and removes a damaged or inappropriate base from DNA. Lindahl identified DNA glycosylases as the enzymes that initiate base excision repair.
DNA double helix: The two-stranded helical structure in which complementary DNA sequences pair through hydrogen bonds. Its apparent structural stability made Lindahl’s evidence of continual chemical decay especially consequential.
Paul Modrich: An American biochemist who elucidated the mechanism of DNA mismatch repair. He shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Lindahl for work on DNA repair.
Chemical carcinogenesis: The process by which exposure to chemicals causes or promotes cancer. Lindahl’s research connected chemical changes in DNA with the need for cellular repair.
Mismatch repair: A pathway that corrects mispaired bases and small insertion or deletion loops left after DNA replication. It corrects copying errors, whereas Lindahl’s central discoveries concerned spontaneous chemical damage.

Linked from 3 pages