The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013 was awarded jointly to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof "for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells"
Three scientists whose work has shed light on the internal “package delivery” system of the cell – which ensures that vital chemicals are delivered to the correct cellular address at the right time – have each won a share of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
Three scientists whose work has shed light on the internal “package delivery” system of the cell – which ensures that vital chemicals are delivered to the correct cellular address at the right time – have each won a share of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
Two Americans and a German were jointly awarded the 8 million Swedish Kroner (£776,000) prize for their separate work on how cellular packets or “vesicles” are able to find their way through the maze of compartments in a cell to the correct location for delivering their cargo of chemicals.
Randy Schekman, of the University of California at Berkeley, carried out pioneering work in the 1970s on yeast cells which revealed the genes that played a crucial role in this transport system, with mutant cells leading to visible vesicle congestion within the cell.
James Rothman, now at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, worked on mammalian cells in the 1980s and 1990s and showed how proteins enabled vesicles to dock and fuse with their target sites on the complex network of internal membranes that form compartments within a cell.
Meanwhile, German-born Thomas Südhof, now based at Stanford University in California, built on the work of Schekman and Rothman and discovered the precisely-controlled mechanism that allows vesicles to release their load of chemicals at the right location and, crucially, at the right time.
Professor Südhof worked on nerve cells and his findings on this calcium-controlled mechanism of vesicle delivery were critical to understanding how chemical messengers or neurotransmitters are released and re-absorbed across the tiny gap or synapse that links two or more communicating neurons.
“Together, Rothman, Schekmand and Südhof have transformed the way we view transport of molecular cargo to specific destinations inside and outside the cell,” said the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
“Their discoveries explain a long-standing enigma of cell biology and also shed new light on how disturbances in this machinery can have deleterious effects and contribute to conditions such as neurological diseases, diabetes and immunological disorders,” it said.
Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine have been awarded 103 times between 1901 and 2012. In all but 38 cases they were given to more than one recipient.
Famous previous winners include Robert Koch, the German doctor and bacteriologist who won in 1905 for his work on tuberculosis, and Frederick Banting, the Canadian physiologist who with his assistant Charles Best discovered insulin, the principal remedy for diabetes, taking the prize in 1923.
Weblink: Independent UK
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