This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

Got a minute?

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Yasunuri

Osumi of Japan for his discoveries of mechanisms of what's known as

autophagy. Break the word down and you get auto and phagee from the Greek

for self-auto and eating phagian so self-eating

autophagy refers to the process in cells whereby they destroy themselves and

send the parts out for recycling.

Cells do this by enclosing their contents in tiny sacks called vesicles.

Those vesicles then get transported to an organelle within the cell called the lysosome where the sacks get degraded and the contents are made available for reuse

Otophagy had been observed a half century before Osumi's work in the 1990s

while at the University of Tokyo,

but it was his research that made clear its fundamental importance.

He did that work with Baker's yeast.

One way he made his discoveries was to interfere with the process and thus see vesicles involved in autophagy start to build up.

This action proved that yeast cells performed autophagy.

He went on to identify 15 genes crucial for the process.

Need quick fuel for energy? Autophagy makes that fuel available fast.

Need raw materials for maintenance in other cells.

Autophagy gets those materials into the system so the body can respond to starvation and other stresses.

Infected, autophagy plays a role in capturing and killing bacteria and viruses.

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