2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology

2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology
Categories: News

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy. Autophagy is a general term for the degradation of cytoplasmic components within lysosomes and Ohsumi's discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes.

Yoshinori Ohsumi (born February 9, 1945), is a Japanese cell biologist specializing in autophagy. He received a B.Sci. in 1967 and a D.Sci. in 1974, both from the University of Tokyo. He spent 3 years (1974–77) as a postdoctoral fellow  at the Rockefeller University in New York City. Ohsumi is currently a professor in Tokyo Institute of Technology's Frontier Research Center, where he is Head of Cell Biology.  In 2012, he received the Kyoto Prize for Basic Science.

Autophagy is a general term for the degradation of cytoplasmic components within lysosomes (Cuervo 2004; Levine and Klionsky 2004; Shintani and Klionsky 2004; Klionsky 2005, 2007; Mizushima and Klionsky 2007). This process is quite distinct from endocytosis-mediated lysosomal degradation of extracellular and plasma membrane proteins. The word autophagy originates from the Greek words auto-, meaning "self", and phagein, meaning "to eat". Thus,autophagy denotes "self eating". 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 the lysosome, for degradation. 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 in autophagy 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.

Key publications

Takeshige, K., Baba, M., Tsuboi, S., Noda, T. and Ohsumi, Y. (1992). Autophagy in yeast demonstrated with proteinase-deficient mutants and conditions for its induction. Journal of Cell Biology 119, 301-311

Tsukada, M. and Ohsumi, Y. (1993). Isolation and characterization of autophagy-defective mutants of Saccharomyces cervisiae. FEBS Letters 333, 169-174

Mizushima, N., Noda, T., Yoshimori, T., Tanaka, Y., Ishii, T., George, M.D., Klionsky, D.J., Ohsumi, M. and Ohsumi, Y. (1998). A protein conjugation system essential for autophagy. Nature 395, 395-398

Ichimura, Y., Kirisako T., Takao, T., Satomi, Y., Shimonishi, Y., Ishihara, N., Mizushima, N., Tanida, I., Kominami, E., Ohsumi, M., Noda, T. and Ohsumi, Y. (2000). A ubiquitin-like system mediates protein lipidation. Nature, 408, 488-492

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