[Yoshinori Ohsumi], who is currently a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Yokohama, was recognized for his experiments in the 1990s, when he used baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to identify genes that control how cells destroy their own contents. The same kinds of mechanism operate in human cells — and are sometimes involved in genetic disease.
[...] "Without autophagy our cells won't survive," says Juleen Zierath, a physiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who was on the selection committee for the medicine Nobel. When cells are starved, they can consume their own proteins for fuel. The same degradation process can be used to eliminate damaged proteins and organelles — effectively, to renew cells and clear out debris — or to ward off invading bacteria and viruses.
[...] Ohsumi, who will collect 8 million Swedish kronor (US$940,000) for the Nobel prize, also won the ¥50-million (US$626,000) Kyoto Prize in basic sciences in 2012 for his autophagy work.
http://www.nature.com/news/medicine-nobel-for-research-on-how-cells-eat-themselves-1.20721
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @10:40AM
...a Miata.