Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoverers cellular traffic - The País.com (Spain)

Three Investigators working in the United States receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries of the molecular machinery that regulates vesicular traffic, key transport system in our cells”, as announced by the Karolinska Institute Stockholm, which awards grants each year. The winners are James E.Rothman, Randy and Thomas C.Südhof W.Schekman, the first two were born in the U.S., in 1959 and 1948 respectively, and the third in Germany in 1955.

Südhof

received the news of the Nobel in Spain, particularly in Baeza, where he gives a lecture today at the symposium membrane traffic at the synapse. The cell biology of synaptic plasticity, organized by José A.Esteban, Juan Lerma and Thomas L. Schwarz International University of Andalusia.

“The 2013 Nobel honors four scientists who solved the mystery of how the cell organizes its transportation system,” said the Karolinska. “Each cell is a factory which produces and exports molecules. For example, insulin is produced and broadcast in the blood and chemical signals called neurotransmitters are sent from one nerve cell to another. These molecules are transported by the cell in small packets called vesicles and the three Nobel Laureates have discovered the molecular principles governing the system by which this cargo is delivered in the right place at the right time in the cell. ” If it does not vesicular transport system essential to its functioning and survival, the cell remains a complex and precise biological machine and collapses into chaos.

Schekman (University of California at Berkeley) discovered a set of genes required for vesicular trafficking; Rothman (Yale University) revealed the protein machinery that allows vesicles bind to their targets to allow that load transfer and Südhof (Stanford University) discovered how signals vesicles arranged to deliver its load accurately. When this system malfunctions in the body may cause neurological and immunological diseases and diabetes. The three researchers are distributed this year’s eight million kronor (915,000 euros) the nobel prize.

cell produces many molecules with different functions, from hormones, neurotransmitters and enzymes up to be displaced within the same cell or outside accurately. Therefore, the organization is essential cellular trafficking and vesicles (“miniature bubbles surrounded by membranes”, the scientists of the Nobel Foundation) make that shuttle between cell organelles. Also bind to the cell membrane to give out its charge. And neurons are activated via neurotransmitters, or metabolism is controlled in the case of hormones. The winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine this year, with their different contributions, unraveled the underlying transport mechanism.

Schekman, who began working in the seventies in the cellular transport organization, yeasts studied this system had indeed defective and discovered three types of genes that control various aspects of the transport of these vesicles. Then Rothman investigated the matter, in mammals, and discovered how vesicles are anchored in the target membrane (like the two sides of a zipper, say the Nobel Foundation) ensuring the perfect anchor in the right place.

“It turned out that some of the genes that were discovered in yeast Schekman coding for the proteins corresponding to those identified by Rothman in mammals, revealing an ancient evolutionary origin of the transport system,” write the scientists at the Karolinska Institute. “Together, they mapped critical components of cellular transport mechanism”.

came Südhof, interested in communication between neurons in the brain nerve. Signal molecules, neurotransmitters, are issued by vesicles that bind to the outer membrane of nerve cells by machinery discovered by Rothman and Schekman. In the nineties, Südhof discovered how, by calcium ions, the vesicles responsible temporal precision meet its mission of transportation.