During autophagy, a cell transports its broken-down components to a certain area where they’re taken apart, so that their chemical components can be reused.
First, Ohsumi needed a way to see autophagy in action, even though the parts being recycled are too small to see individually with a typical microscope.
" The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has today decided to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy."
There is no greater happiness as a researcher than that this research into yeast, into the fundamentals of living things, has turned into such a big springboard for the recent research into autophagy.
And this discovery provided the basis for studying the process in more complex organisms. Since then, we’ve learned that autophagy is essential for normal cellular function in all kinds of organisms, including humans.
This year’s prize has gone to cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi for his work on the phenomenon known as autophagy -- the method that cells use to conserve nutrients to try to save themselves from dying.