The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016 – awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi “for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy”.
Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
“The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016”. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 4 Oct 2016.
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2016/
Yoshinori Ohsumi
Born: 1945, Fukuoka, Japan
Affiliation at the time of the award: Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
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IMAGE SOURCE: KYODO NEWS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Deciphering cell’s recycling machinery earns 2016 Nobel in Physiology and Medicine – Yoshinori Ohsumi honored for studies of autophagy
Ohsumi‘s discoveries helped reveal the mechanism and significance of a fundamental physiological process, biologist Maria Masucci of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden said in a news briefing October 3. “There is growing hope that this knowledge will lead to the development of new strategies for the treatment of many human diseases.”
Scientists got their first glimpse of autophagy in the 1960s, not long after the discovery of the lysosome, a pouch within cells that acts as a garbage disposal, grinding fats and proteins and sugars into their basic building blocks. (That discovery won Belgian scientist Christian de Duve a share of the Nobel Prize in 1974.) Researchers had observed lysosomes stuffed with big chunks of cellular material — like the bulk waste of the cellular world — as well as another, mysterious pouch that carried the waste to the lysosome.
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