Paul modrich duke university
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Paul L. Modrich
Paul Modrich, James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl of the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory in the UK, and Aziz Sancar of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.
Mismatch repair is a mutation avoidance system that stabilizes the genome bygd correcting DNA biosynthetic errors, by blockering recombination between diverged DNA sequences, and in the case of human cells, by targeting for death cells that have suffered certain types of DNA chemical damage. We have reconstituted E. coli mismatch repair in a pure system comprised of ten activities, including the MutH, MutL, MutS, and MutU proteins. Current work on the bacterial pathway addresses the mechanism of this complex reaction and reagent applications of the repair proteins for physical manipulation of DNA sequences based on genetic differences. We have shown that mismatch rep
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Modrich is the James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University Medical Center. His research clarified the nature and functions of DNA mismatch repair, which plays an important role in the control of mutation production. During the course of their work on the human pathway, his laboratory demonstrated that cancer cells characterized by microsatellite instability are defective in mismatch repair and resistant to the action of certain chemotherapeutic drugs.
He is recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Modrich received his B.S. degree in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Stanford University in After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, he joined the Department of Chemistry, UC Berkeley in as an Assistant Professor. He was recruited to the Department of Biochemistry at D
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Upon His Retirement, Paul Modrich Reflects on His Career
Paul Modrich came to Duke in —when Durham had a small-town feel, the smell of curing tobacco filled the air, and southern accents were the norm. He grew up in rural New Mexico but had spent time in Boston—MIT for his undergrad and Harvard for his postdoc—and in California—Stanford for his PhD and UC Berkeley’s Chemistry Department as an Assistant Professor for two years. He was offered the Berkeley position as a graduate student, even though he wasn’t on the job market and they would permit him to delay his professorship for one year to complete his postdoc at Harvard. Paul accepted the offer for two reasons—his friend Jim Wang, who discovered the first DNA topoisomerase, was in the department, and like today, academic jobs were in short supply. Paul hoped for a long-term career at Berkeley Chemistry, but it quickly became apparent that it was not the place for him. So, at the request of Bob Hill, Duke Biochemistry’s Cha