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Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk posted on October 3, 2016. I'm Steve Merski.

This morning, the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Osumi of Japan

for his discoveries of mechanisms of what's known as autophagy, which is Greek for self-eating.

Autophagy refers to a process in cells whereby they destroy themselves and send the parts out for recycling.

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

Those vesicles then get transported to an organelle within the cell

called the lysosome, where the autophagosomes and their contents get degraded and made available for reuse.

Following the announcement in Stockholm this morning, journalist Lada Fredholm spoke to Julian Zirath about the award-winning research.

Zirath is a physiologist at the Karolinska Institute and chairs the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

Could you please describe to us why our cells need to use autophagy or self-eating?

So, atopathy, you know, comes from the Greek terminology of self-eating. And without autophagy or self-eating? So autophagy, you know, comes from the Greek terminology of self-eating.

And without autophagy, our cells won't survive.

We need autophagy to ward off invading molecules, for example,

to deal with very large proteins that might be long-lived or perhaps defective.

So we need to be able to have autophagy to degrade proteins, but we also need autophagy for renewal.

In other words, we need autophagy to break down proteins for self-reliance.

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