Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan Wins Nobel Prize In Medicine For Study of Cell Recycling (theguardian.com)

Dave Knott writes from a report via The Guardian: The 2016 Nobel prize in medicine has been awarded to Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi for discoveries on how cells break down and recycle their own components. Ohsumi uncovered "mechanisms for autophagy," a fundamental process in cells that scientists believe can be harnessed to fight cancer and dementia. Autophagy is the body's internal recycling program -- scrap cell components are captured and the useful parts are stripped out to generate energy or build new cells. The process is crucial for preventing cancerous growths, warding off infection and, by maintaining a healthy metabolism, it helps protect against conditions like diabetes. The report adds: "[Ohsumi] said he chose to focus on the cell's waste disposal system, an unfashionable subject at the time, because he wanted to work on something different. By studying the process in yeast cells, Ohsumi identified the main genes involved in autophagy and showed how the proteins they code for come together to build the autophagosome membrane. He later showed that a similar cellular recycling process occurs in human cells -- and that our cells would not survive without it."

Comments

huge

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a huge discovery and his first steps were pretty ingenious. like everything else in molecular biology the complexity is unreal and our understanding of all the various aspects is pretty trivial. the field has exploded and there's even a journal called Autophagy now, if that's any indicator of its importance. The main huge area of research of late is how cancer cells use autophagy to evade nutrient starvation under hypoxic growth conditions as well as survive chemotherapeutic insults. there's pretty cool specific examples in the literature of cancer cells eating all of their ribosomes (ribosomal autophagy- ribophagy) to rapidly shutdown most translation in a cell to go into an "emergency mode" and cut energy usage to bare bones levels. But cells also evade becoming cancerous by using autophagy to die so understanding the balance is critical.
blah blah tl:dr...congrats richly deserved