Discovering System of Self-eating

As always, Nobel crazy of the year started. Newspapers in Japan reported with huge headlines that the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden awarded Professor Emeritus of Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yoshinori Osumi, for Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. Ohsumi discovered mechanisms for autophagy, which was a process for degrading and recycling cellular components. He became the twenty-fifth Japanese Nobel laureate.

As sports section does everyday, the papers reported the details of record of Nobel Prizes to the Japanese. Ohsumi made the fourth Japanese laureate of Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, following Susumu Tonegawa in 1987, Shinya Yamanaka in 2012 and Satoshi Omura last year. Ohsumi also became the first single laureate of Nobel Prize in natural science, since Tonegawa. The award will be handed in December 10^th with 8 million Swedish Krona.

So, what was his achievement, anyway? Protein is indispensable for human body to make every activity including breathing, digestion or reproduction. A human produces 300g of protein everyday. 70g to 80g of that is made from food. The rest of that is gained with autophagy, which degrades protein of the body and recycles it as a resource for newly produced protein. The phenomenon has a role of cleaning old protein causing disease.

Focusing on vacuole, an organ that contained wastes with ferment cells, Ohsumi observed autophagy through optical microscope for the first time in the world in 1988. Ohsumi found that protein in cells was transported to vacuole, when a special ferment was left in a situation of starvation. The result was made public in 1992. With discovery of 15 genes necessary for autophagy by Ohsumi, scientists were more interested in studying autophagy, leading to recognition that the phenomenon was common to every creature.

The discovery of autophagy is expected to contribute for development in treatment of many diseases, including Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease. “Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease,” praised Karolinska Institutet in their homepage. For Ohsumi, however, Nobel Prize was an opportunity for encouraging young scientists. “A scientist on basic study can take this kind of opportunity, if he were fortunate,” said Ohsumi after the announcement of Nobel Prize.