Paul L. Modrich
Paul Lawrence Modrich (born June 13, 1946) is an American biochemist, James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1973 from Stanford University and an B.S. degree in 1968 from MIT. He is known for his research on DNA mismatch repair.
Early life
Modrich was born on June 13, 1946, in Raton, New Mexico. He is of Croatian descent; his paternal grandfather and grandmother (of Montenegrin descent) immigrated to the United States from Croatia.
Research
Modrich joined Duke University's faculty in 1976 and has been a Howard Hughes Investigator since 1995. He works primarily on strand-directed mismatch repair. His lab demonstrated how DNA mismatch repair serves as a copyeditor to prevent errors from DNA polymerase. Matthew Meselson previously proposed the existence of recognition of mismatches. Modrich performed biochemical experiments to study mismatch repair in E. coli. They later searched for proteins associated with mismatch repair in humans.
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