Yoshinori Ohsumi's Nobel Price

Yoshinori is a Japanese cell biologist specializing in autophagy, borned in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1945, so he is 72 years old. He studied at the University of Tokyo where he received his doctoral degree in 1974. After a few years at Rockefeller University, New York, he returned to the University of Tokyo. In 1996 he moved to the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki. He worked for the Tokyo Institute of Technology, nowadays he is retired. He is married to Mariko Ohsumi that is one of his scientific collaborators.
Yoshinori won many awards on his career, such as Gairdner Foundation International prize in 2015, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last year (2016) and Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences this year (2017), but I'm going to concentrate in his Nobel Prize.

He won the Nobel Prize because of his discoverys about the autophagy. Do you know what it means?
Autophagy is a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components. The word autophagy originates from the Greek words auto-, meaning "self", and phagein, meaning "to eat". Thus,autophagy denotes "self eating". This concept emerged during the 1960's, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sack-like vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation. Difficulties in studying the phenomenon meant that little was known until, in a series of brilliant experiments in the early 1990's, Yoshinori Ohsumi used baker's yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy. He then went on to elucidate the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and showed that similar sophisticated machinery is used in our cells.
I have chosen this biologist, because his name and the name of a character of Mario Bros that I like it a lot are the same ones: "Yoshi".

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Yoshinori Ohsumi 1
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