autophagy 復習
GomezさんやAkimさんと同じ記事になります。
Yoshinori Ohsumi Awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for his discoveries on how cells recycle their content, a process known as autophagy.
Autophagy, derived from the Greek, means “self-eating.”
“This concept emerged during the 1960s, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sacklike vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation,” the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm said in announcing the prize.
Dr. Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy, and he went on to examine the underlying mechanisms of the process.
“Ohsumi’s discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content,” the Nobel Assembly said. “His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection.”
Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, the assembly said, and the process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease.
Dr. Ohsumi, born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, is a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
今回取り上げるのはautophagyです。手持ちの辞書には載っておらず、インターネットの力を借りました。英辞郎 on the WEBには「（生物）自食作用」とありました。そのままカタカナで「オートファジー」ともいうようです。自食作用とはどのような作用なのかわからなかったので調べてみますと、Wikipediaには「細胞が持っている、細胞内のタンパク質を分解するための仕組みの一つ。」と説明されておりました。この分解は細胞内に蓄積した異常なタンパク質を取り除くのにも役立っていて、これにおいて生じたアミノ酸は栄養として再び利用されるということです。本文では “the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sacklike vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation” という部分が自食作用の説明となっています。（aqua）
