Yoshinori Ohsumi wins Nobel prize in medicine for work on autophagy

But what exactly is autophagy?

Autophagy is when the body eats itself.

Autophagy is the body’s internal recycling programme - scrap cell components are captured and the useful parts are stripped out to generate energy or build new cells. The process is crucial for preventing cancerous growths, warding off infection and, by maintaining a healthy metabolism, it helps protect against conditions like diabetes.

Dysfunctional autophagy has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and a host of age-related disorders. Intense research is underway to develop drugs that can target autophagy to treat various diseases.

Let's look into the paper which won the nobel prize

One of the highlights I took from this work is that this may be a clue into the aging process and how to slow it down. Autophagy seems to be a critical not yet well understood process and this paper improved our understanding.

Juleen Zierath, a member of the Nobel committee, said: “Every day we need to replace about 200 to 300g of protein in our bodies... We are eating proteins every day, about 70g, but that’s not enough to take care of the requirement to make new proteins. Because of this machinery, we’re able to rely on some of our own proteins, maybe the damaged proteins or the long-lived proteins, and they are recycled with this sophisticated machinery so that we can sustain and we survive.”

Autophagy can be triggered by fasting, possibly by intermittent fasting. In a sense, intermittent fasting forces the body to recycle broken cells. In specific the paper which explained this process focused on autophagy in yeast which allowed for the study of the cell recycling process in detail. 15 genes were identified in the 1990s that controlled the process of autophagy and this opened up the door to a new area of biology.

References

Kawamata, T., Horie, T., Matsunami, M., Sasaki, M., & Ohsumi, Y. (2017). Zinc starvation induces autophagy in yeast. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 292(20), 8520-8530.
Web:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshinori_Ohsumi
3. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/03/yoshinori-ohsumi-wins-nobel-prize-in-medicine
4. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/japanese-scientist-won-nobel-prize-cell-self-eating/