Nobel Prize 2016 in Physiology or Medicine

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy which was announced on 3rd October 2016

This year's Nobel Laureate discovered and elucidated mechanisms underlying autophagy, a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components.

The word autophagy originates from the Greek words auto- meaning self and phagein- meaning to eat. Thus, autophagy denotes "self eating." Its a process whereby the eukaryotic cell can recycle part of its own content. This concept emerged during the 1960's, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sack like vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called lysosome, for degradation. Unlike other cellular degradation machineries, autophagy removes long lived proteins, large macro molecular complexes and organelles that have become obsolete or damaged. Difficulties in studying the phenomenon meant that little was known until, in a series of brilliant experiments in the early 1990's. Yoshinori Ohsumi used baker's yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy. He then went on to elucidate the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and showed that similar sophisticated machinery is used in our cells.

Ohsumi's discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content. His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection. Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease.

Yoshinori Ohsumi is a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009