Photo credit: Bengt Nyman — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Aziz Sancar
born 1946 · Türkiye, United States · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2015
Turkish-American biochemist who mapped nucleotide excision repair — how cells cut out UV-damaged DNA segments — and linked it to the circadian clock.
Nobel Prize work
Shared with Tomas Lindahl and Paul Modrich for mechanistic studies of DNA repair. Sancar reconstituted nucleotide excision repair, identifying the excinuclease enzymes that nick DNA on both sides of a lesion and showing that the photolyase/cryptochrome family ties repair to circadian rhythm — explaining how genomes survive UV damage.