Japanese Scientist, Yoshinori Ohsumi Wins Nobel Prize For 'Self-Eating' Cells Study

Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist, has won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel Foundation announced on Monday, October 3rd that Dr. Ohsumi was the recipient of the award for his ground-breaking experiments with yeast which revealed a major function in the body's defenses where cells degrade and recycle their parts.

According to Live Science, autophagy, from the Greek words "auto" and "phagein," meaning self and to eat, is a process that allows cells to destroy their own parts and essentially recycle them. There weren't a lot of information about cells' odd behavior until Dr. Ohsumi's "brilliant experiments" in the early 1990s.

The Nobel Foundation released a statement saying that the scientist had identified genes in yeast that were vital to autophagy, which showed the regulating mechanisms of the process in yeast. Dr. Ohsumi's studies also showed that the same mechanisms were used in human cells. The prize committee said in its statement that understanding autophagy or "self-eating" has led to a better understanding of diseases including infectious diseases, cancers and neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's and Parkinson's. "Ohsumi's discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content," it said.

Dr. Ohsumi was born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan and has been a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009. After receiving the news that he won the Nobel Prize, he told Kyodo News agency that he was "extremely honored" to get the prize. Also, in a different interview with NHK, Dr. Ohsumi also said, he had "always wanted to do something that other people wouldn't do", reported New York Times. "I thought the breakdown (of cells) would be interesting, and that was my start," he said. His discoveries led to a better understanding of how cells recycle their contents and showed how autophagy can play a key role in other physiological processes such as a cell's response to infection or starvation.

Reports said that the discovery dates back to the 1950s, when scientists found out about a specialized section, or organelle, inside cells that break down proteins, carbs, and lipids or fats. The Nobel statement stated that after some time, researchers found that other organelles were sometimes found whole inside this specialized section called a lisosome. These researchers were sure that there had to be a transport system that brings these fairly large cell parts to the compartment. Researchers also said that these travel vehicles, now called autophagosomes, carried "cellular cargo" to the lysosome to be broken down.

Chister Hoog, a professor at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, told Reuters the work helped explain crucial processes in human development, from growing up, to aging to succumbing to disease. "In the very early stages (of a human's development) your organs and your whole body are constantly being made over again, you are growing. So you need to get rid of the old stuff and generate new structures," he said. "When you undergo aging, you have structures that have to be taken away and this, autophagy, is the principle that gets rid of them.

Hoog also added saying that if the system, the genes, and proteins involved in autophagy, gets affected, it will no longer be possible for the body to take care of its waste which can lead to the accumulation of these wastes and will eventually lead to the development of different types of disease.