Thomas lindahl nobel prize
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Tomas Lindahl and the Surprising Instability of DNA
Today we know that each and every day, our DNA is damaged by UV light, free radicals or carcinogenic substances. And even without such external attacks, DNA can undergo many changes, for instance during replication.
Thomas lindahl nobel prize
But in the s, with the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure only one decade earlier, DNA was viewed as something inherently stable.
In , Tomas Lindahl set out to tackle a question that seemed so far-fetched at the time that he didn’t even apply for a grant.
Instead, to study the stability or instability of DNA exerimentally, he used money he had been awarded beforehand.
Already as a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton, Tomas Lindahl had found that tranfer RNA, or tRNA, could be quite unstable under certain conditions.
This finding ran against the current belief that DNA should be extremely stable. Since RNA is usually single-stranded, some reduced stability would be expected. But still Tomas Lind