Award ceremony in Frankfurt's Paulskirche – Acknowledgement of
Frederick W. Alt and David G. Schatz, winners of the main prize, and of
Leif S. Ludwig, winner of the Early Career Award
The 2023 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, worth €120,000, will
today be awarded to immunologists Frederick W. Alt and David G. Schatz in
Frankfurt's Paulskirche for their discovery of molecules and mechanisms that
enable our immune system to perform the astonishing feat of recognizing
billions of different bacterial, viral and other antigens on first contact. The
Early Career Award goes to Leif S. Ludwig, biochemist and physician, for a
method he has devised to analyze the origin and development of human
blood cells, which also include the cells of the immune system.
FRANKFURT. Unlike more primitive organisms, jawed vertebrates like we humans not
only have an innate immune system but also an adaptive one that is capable of
preparing itself for all kinds of invaders. This is because – at some point in the course of
evolution – one of our ancestors apparently succeeded in taming a DNA parasite that
had implanted itself in his genome. This is how the parasite became the gene for an
enzyme that advanced to become the command center of immunological diversity. This
enzyme, RAG1/2, excises fragments from the DNA of certain chromosomes in
maturing immune cells (lymphocytes) and recombines them to form functional genes
in a random process. This somatic recombination multiplies the variability of antibodies
and T cell receptors. It is a prerequisite for our body's ability to build around ten billion
different antibodies, although it only has about 20,000 protein blueprints in the form of
genes. David G. Schatz discovered the RAG1/2 enzyme, Frederick W. Alt the
enzymes that repair the DNA excised by it. “In decades of research, Alt and Schatz have
shed light on the previously hidden evolution of our adaptive immunity, and in so
doing they have raised our knowledge of the development of the immune system to a
new level," says Professor Thomas Boehm, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the
Paul Ehrlich Foundation, commending the achievements of the two winners of the
main prize.
The RAG1/2 enzyme is the motor for somatic recombination. Without it, neither
functional B and T cells nor effective adaptive immunity can develop. Many cases of
severe immunodeficiency are caused by mutations of the RAG genes, and some
lymphomas and leukemias are associated with malfunctions of the enzymes encoded
by these genes. This makes understanding not only the molecular mechanism but also
their evolutionary origin and how they behave in the living cell nucleus even more
important. According to Schatz's findings, RAG1/2 originates from a gene that began
jumping at will through the genome of our very early ancestors millions of years ago,
like a kind of selfish parasite. In structural biology studies, Schatz has traced these
jumps (transposons) over several stages of evolution. He has shown which biochemical
tricks we vertebrates used to fix the jumping RAG1/2 gene at a certain position and
harness it for the immune system.
As they migrate through the cell nucleus of immature lymphocytes, RAG enzymes
draw together chromatin clusters, in which the DNA is coiled up in a space-saving way,
temporarily and again and again to form recombination centers. There, they perform
chromatin scanning, which Alt has described for the first time. They draw a chromatin
thread, which can be over a million DNA letters long, through the recombination
center like a loop. The result is that gene segments previously far apart are suddenly
opposite each other and can be joined firmly together.
The B and T lymphocytes, on which acquired immunity rests, are components of our
blood, in which at least 500 billion old cells per day are replaced by new ones in a
healthy person. They originate from hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow and
then mature on divergent developmental trajectories over several stages, like all other
blood cells. Determining the resulting lineages and relationships is highly interesting
for medicine, for example for identifying at which branch point a leukemia cell forms.
Leif S. Ludwig, the winner of this year's Early Career Award, has devised a method
that opens up the possibility for the first time for medicine to do this relatively
inexpensively, quickly and reliably. Ludwig's method, which has already been tested
on individual patients, combines the analysis of mutations in mitochondria with the
latest technologies for the gene sequencing of individual cells.