Aziz Sancar

Aziz Sancar (born September 8, 1946, Savur, Mardin, Turkey) is a Turkish-American biochemist who contributed to mechanistic discoveries underlying a cellular process known as nucleotide excision repair, whereby cells correct errors in DNA that arise as a result of exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light or certain mutation-inducing chemicals. For his discoveries pertaining to mechanisms of DNA repair, Sancar received the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (shared with Swedish biochemist Tomas Lindahl and American biochemist Paul Modrich).

Sancar received an M.D. in 1969 from the Istanbul Medical School and subsequently worked as a local physician near Savur. In 1973 he went to the United States to study molecular biology at the University of Texas, Dallas, where four years later he completed a Ph.D. He then accepted a position as a research associate at Yale University and in 1982 joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, where he later was named the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

As a graduate student, Sancar studied an enzyme known as DNA photolyase in the bacterium Escherichia coli. At the time, the enzyme had been recently found to mediate the process of photoreactivation, whereby visible light induces enzymatic reactions that repair DNA damaged by UV irradiation. After moving to Yale, Sancar turned his attention to several other DNA repair factors in E. coli, namely the genes uvrA, uvrB, and uvrC. He purified the genes and reconstituted them in vitro (“in glass,” or outside a living organism), leading to his discovery of the excision repair function of an enzyme known as uvrABC nuclease (excision nuclease, or excinuclease) in E. coli. The enzyme specifically targeted DNA that had been damaged by UV or chemical exposure, cutting the affected DNA strand at each end of the damaged region and thereby enabling the removal of the damaged nucleotides.

Sancar and his colleagues later reconstituted a human excision nuclease, identified components required for nucleotide excision repair in human cells, and proposed that human cells employed additional enzymes in the removal of the excised portion of DNA. He also identified a role for defective nucleotide excision repair in the production of neurological abnormalities associated with xeroderma pigmentosum, a neurodegenerative condition that predisposes individuals to skin cancer. Abnormalities in nucleotide excision repair also were found to underlie other rare hereditary disorders, including Cockayne syndrome (characterized by multisystemic effects, such as dwarfism and photosensitivity) and photosensitive trichothiodystrophy (characterized by sulfur-deficient brittle hair, developmental abnormalities, and extreme sensitivity to ultraviolet light with normal skin cancer risk).

From the early 1980s Sancar continued to investigate photolyase in E. coli, and later he began to explore DNA damage checkpoints. He discovered two light-harvesting chromophores in photolyase, which he proposed were key components of the photolyase reaction mechanism and its activity at the blue end of the visible light spectrum. In the early 2000s he directly observed, for the first time, the mechanism of DNA repair by photolyase. Sancar also investigated human photolyase orthologs (genes evolutionarily related to E. coli DNA photolyase) known as cryptochrome 1 and 2. He found that the cryptochromes, which are located in the eye, function as photoreceptive components of the mammalian circadian clock.

Sancar was an elected member of multiple academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2005), and the Turkish Academy of Sciences (2006).