23/03/2024
Did you know that our body 'eats' itself to stay healthy?
Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy or ‘self-eating’ which refers to the way our cells destroy and recycle their own contents.
The concept of autophagy emerged during the 1960s, 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.
However, the phenomenon was difficult to study until the 1990s, when Ohsumi conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments with baker’s yeast to identify the genes involved in autophagy. He went on to explain the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and showed the similar machinery is used in our cells.
His discoveries accelerated understanding of how cells recycle their contents to stay healthy and laid the foundation for a better understanding of the ability of cells to manage malnutrition and infections, the causes of certain hereditary and neurological diseases, and cancer.
Read more about his work: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/ohsumi/biographical/
