Yoshinori Ohsumi, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, was awarded science's most prestigious award for "his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy," the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine announced in Stockholm on Monday October 3rd.
"The work of Yoshinori Ohsumi dramatically transformed the understanding of this vital cellular process," the committee announced.
In most years, two or three scientists have to share the Nobel Prize between them because their work has been similarly essential to drive a research field forward.
'The key figure'
Volker Haucke, the director of the Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology in Berlin, told DW that the committee made the right decision.
"Oshumi is the key figure in unraveling this pathway, with studies that started in the early 1980s," Haucke said. "He is the person who started to delineate the process of autophagy in yeast at a time when researchers worldwide hardly knew autophagy even existed."
Monda's announcement was no surprise to many scientists in Oshumi's research field. "Everyone reckoned that it was Oshumi's turn," said Thomas Wollert, of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry.
Toxic cell material
Autophagy, a Greek compound meaning "self-eating," was coined in the 1960s by the Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve. He had observed the phenomenon for the first time in liver tissue when he discovered the lysosome - the recycling compartment of cells - for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974.
Cells use this process to destroy their contents when they have no more use for them.
"Autophagy is the prime pathway that takes care of damaged proteins or organelles that accumulate over time," Leibniz's Haucke said.
The Planck Insitute's Wollert calls it a recycling system that enables cells to break down those unwanted parts into their components and use them again for other purposes. The process is essential for cellular health, he said.
