Photo credit: Bengt Nyman — File:Tomas Lindahl 5134-2015.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tomas Lindahl
born 1938 · Sweden, United Kingdom · 20th century
Nobel Chemistry 2015
Swedish-British biochemist who revealed how cells continuously repair DNA against spontaneous chemical decay.
Nobel Prize work
Lindahl showed that DNA is inherently unstable and quantified the constant chemical damage it suffers, then discovered the base-excision repair machinery: glycosylases that snip out damaged bases and enzymes that restore the strand. His mechanistic work explained how genomes survive their own chemistry.
Fields
Related topics
DNA and RNA structure
DNA stores information in a paired double helix; RNA shares the nucleotide backbone but often forms diverse single-stranded folds.
Replication, transcription, translation
Cells copy genetic material, transcribe selected DNA segments into RNA, and translate messenger RNA into polypeptides.