Nobel in Physiology or Medicine awarded for discovery of mechanisms behind autophagy
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.0210137
New York Times : The Nobel Prize committee announced on 3 October that Yoshinori Ohsumi is the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries relating to autophagy. Autophagy is the process in which a cell that is starved of food or is somehow damaged breaks down its nonvital internal components and harvests the stored energy to prolong the cell’s life. Autophagy also serves as part of a cell’s defense systems against invading viruses and bacteria. In the early 1990s, while at the University of Tokyo, Ohsumi began studying cell degradation in yeast, which led to his discoveries of many of the mechanisms and genes that are involved in the process.
