Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi wins the Nobel Medicine Prize
Q. Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan on 3rd Oct won the Nobel Medicine Prize for his work on autophagy. What is autophagy?- Published on 04 Oct 16a. Process by which cells disrupt neurons
b. Process by which cells differentiate themselves
c. Process by which cells divide themselves
d. Process by which cells eat themselves
ANSWER: Process by which cells eat themselves
Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan on 3rd Oct won the Nobel Medicine Prize for his work on autophagy– a process by which cells eat themselves which can lead to Parkinson’s and diabetes
Autophagy is a fundamental process in cell physiology with implications for human health and disease
- Process is vital for the orderly degradation and recycling of damaged cell parts; its failure leads to ageing and cell damage
- Researchers first observed that cells could destroy their own content by wrapping up in membranes and transferring them to recycling compartment called lysosome in the 1960s
- Oshumi used baker’s yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy showing the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and similar sophisticated machinery in human cells
- Mutations in autophagy can cause disease like cancer and neurological disorders
- In 2015, William Campbell of the US, Satoshi Omura of Japan and China's Tu Youyou won the prestigious award for their discoveries of treatments against parasites.
