The Chemistry Nobel Prize was announced this morning, and goes to only one guy (which is somehwat unusual in this age of massively collaborative science): Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford University, "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription".
I am very much not a chemist, so all I can really do is sound those words out, and get that "eukarote" is a term for a type of organism, and "transcription" usually seems to involve DNA, so this must have something to do with getting messages from DNA to other parts of the cell. Well, OK, I can also read the press release, which pretty much confirms that.
We're hip-deep in biologists and biochemists here in blogdom, so I'm sure one of them will provide a detailed explanation. Congratulations to Dr. Kornberg.
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Transcription is the process of reading DNA and creating analogous bits of RNA. This process usually involves several different proteins all working in concert to identify the relevant stretch of DNA, unwind DNA from the histones, split the two strands of DNA apart and unravel the double helix, and recruit and join ribonucleotides together to form the RNA strand while maintaining sequence fidelity.
Because mRNA is the interim coding step to proteins, tRNA are involved in protein synthesis as well, and because there are a number of other functions of RNA (ribozymes, RNA interference, etc.) the process of transcribing DNA into RNA is quite important.
Part of the buzz around the Kornberg prize is that he follows in his father's footsteps, who won the Medicine Prize in 1959. But the ultimate father-son Nobel duo was William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg, who jointly won the 1915 physics prize. Talk about running in the family!