Tuesday, 27 October 2009 22:29

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three scientists including British-born biologist Jack Szostak for their work on DNA.

The Royal Swedish Academy awarded the prize to Jack Szostak, together with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for their work in uncovering telomeres.  These are 'caps' of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that protect them from degradation. 

During cell division, the enzymes that copy DNA material cannot continue their duplication all the way to the end of the code, so a small amount of DNA is lost during every duplication.  To stop useful code being lost, our chromosomes have a 'blank' sequence at their ends to act as a buffer, like the margins in a book. 

Before we are born, an enzyme named telomerase repairs the lost ends.  This enzyme is repressed in adult tissue, so that cells can only divide around 20-70 times before dying.  Without this safeguard, cells could keep multiplying forever - the switching off of telomerase is an important process of cancer biology.

Elizabeth Blackburn and Joseph Gall announced the discovery of repeating lengths of DNA at the ends of chromosomes in 1979, which they named telomeres (Greek for 'end part').  Through the 1980s, Blackburn and Szostak confirmed that these sequences stabilised chromosomes.  Later Blackburn worked with graduate student Carol Greider, who went on to identify the genes that code for telomerase.

Jack Szostak is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He graduated with a BSc in cell biology from McGill University at the age of 19 and completed his PhD in biochemistry at Cornell University before moving to Harvard Medical School to start his own lab at the Sydney Farber Cancer Institute. 

He says:

"The world's full of interesting problems and I think I like to work on problems that aren't receiving a huge amount of attention."

Nobel Prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious in their fields - literature, chemistry, physics, peace, and medicine.  They were established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.

Source: Dolan DNA Learning Center blog

Related links

Interview with Jack Szostak

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