Sancar’s lab adds to its toolbox for studying DNA repair
Aziz Sancar, MD, PhD
For UNC biochemistry professor and CEHS member Aziz Sancar and the members of his lab, there’s no resting on the laurels of the Nobel Prize in chemistry that Sancar shared in the fall of 2015 for his life’s work in figuring out one of the key mechanisms of DNA repair.
Sancar and several of his post-docs just rolled out two new papers, both published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that report success in their attempts to come up with a better set of tools for mapping both the repairs the DNA molecule makes to itself after being exposed to known carcinogens, and the actual damage it’s suffered.
Neither age — Sancar will turn 71 in about three months — nor the fuss over the Nobel are slowing down the professor’s work.
“He just wants to focus on the science,” said Wentao Li, the post-doc who was the lead author of one of the papers, which reported on how well a newly refined mapping technique worked in spotting repairs triggered by exposure to a chemical in cigarette smoke that’s known to be the major cause of lung cancer.
The other paper, worked on by a portion of the same team, this time with post-doc Jinchuan Hu as the lead author, used another mapping refinement to look at DNA damaged from being exposed to ultraviolet light, the cause of skin cancer.
