2016 Nobel prize in medicine goes to Japanese scientist.

Yoshinori Ohsumi from the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Frontier Research Center, Japan, has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of the mechanisms of autophagy. Fittingly for a scientist who has maintained a high profile and consistent output since his landmark discoveries in the early 1990s, Ohsumi was in his laboratory when he got the famous phone call. “I heard that [the award was given to] only me, it was also a surprise for me!”, he told an interviewer from Nobel Media. The prize is often given to two or more scientists, but there will be no complaints that Ohsumi has received all the attention—or that he will receive all of the 8 million Swedish Krona prize money (about £730 000). Autophagy is the process by which cytoplasmic constituents are delivered to the lysosome for degradation and recycling. It provides fuel for energy and the building blocks for new cell components. It’s how cells cope with starvation and stress. Autophagy can eliminate damaged or toxic proteins and the disruption of the process is linked to many diseases of ageing, including neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. It is also involved in the defence against harmful pathogens in the body. In 1988, then an assistant professor at Tokyo University in Japan, Ohsumi started his own laboratory to study autophagy in Saccharomyces cerevisae, brewer’s yeast, the vacuoles in which are a good model for lysosomes in mammalian cells. He did not know if autophagy occurred in yeast but reasoned that if he interfered with the autophagic process the vacuoles in his yeast cells would fill with undegraded cytoplasmic components. He developed yeast strains that lacked two important proteases and when he looked down his light microscope he saw abnormal vacuoles bulging with undigested autophagosomes, the structures that deliver cytoplasmic refuse.