Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

.jp. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Steve Merski. Got a minute?

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Yoshinuri Osumi of Japan for his discoveries of mechanisms of what's known as autophagy.

Break the word down and you get auto and phagy 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. Autophagy 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. It

clears out damaged proteins and organelles, thus helping to fight the effects of aging. At the other

...