Modrich, Paul

Paul Modrich, (born 1946, Raton, New Mexico, U.S.), American biochemist who discovered mismatch repair, a mechanism by which cells detect and correct errors that are introduced into DNA during DNA replication and cell division. Modrich was among the first to show that a common form of inherited colorectal cancer is due to defective mismatch repair. For his contributions to the understanding of DNA repair and its role in human disease, Modrich received the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (shared with Swedish biochemist Tomas Lindahl and Turkish-American biochemist Aziz Sancar).

Modrich received a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1968 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1973 from Stanford University. In 1976, following postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School, he went to Duke University, where he joined the faculty as an assistant professor, and in 1988 he was named James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry.

As a graduate student at Stanford, Modrich investigated an enzyme called ligase and its ability to catalyze the joining together of nucleotides in the DNA of the bacterium Escherichia coli. He found that ligase enzymes are essential to normal DNA synthesis in E. coli and hence are fundamental to the bacterium’s survival. In the late 1970s, intrigued by DNA lesions and the process of DNA replication, Modrich began to examine base-pair mismatches in E. coli DNA that are acquired during homologous recombination (the exchange of genetic material between two identical or nearly identical strands of DNA during DNA replication). By the early 1980s he had developed an assay to analyze mismatched base pairs. The development facilitated his subsequent identification and characterization of proteins and events involved in methyl-directed mismatch repair in E. coli, in which the absence of methyl groups on newly synthesized daughter strands of DNA serves as the signal for the initiation of mismatch repair.

In the early 1990s Modrich described the excision mechanism by which mismatched DNA is targeted and eliminated in E. coli cells. He also elucidated the mechanism of mismatch repair in human cells, revealing key similarities to the mechanism used by bacteria. He later uncovered a role for mismatch repair deficiency in hereditary nonpolyposis colon cancer (Lynch syndrome)—the most prevalent type of hereditary colorectal malignancy in humans—as well as in certain neurodegenerative conditions, such as Huntington disease.

Modrich was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1993 and the following year became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2004.