The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine 2009 'for telomere biology' and its relevance to cancer and related diseases.

摘要

Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak have been jointly awarded the 100th Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for the discovery of "how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase". This discovery of basic research done in a primitive organism has been a breakthrough for the understanding of how cells successfully maintain cell division and turn into tumoral or senescent cells, with an important impact in human health and disease. Telomeres were first described in 1930 by Hermann Miiller (Nobel Prize 1945) and Barbara McClintock (Nobel Prize 1983) who observed in the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) [1] and in maize (Zea mays) [2] that natural chromosome ends had special properties and structures that played an essential function in their protection. These structures were called telomeres (from the Greek "telos" for end and "melos" for part) by Miiller. Later, it was known that telomeres are terminal DNA-protein complexes that form capping structures in order to stabilise chromosome ends and prevent them from being recognised as DNA double-strand breaks [3].