Yoshinori Ohsumi
Found the genes that make autophagy work, and with them the link from TOR to the autophagy machinery
Honorary Professor, Cell Biology Center, Institute of Integrated Research, Institute of Science Tokyo · Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016, “for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy” · PhD, University of Tokyo (1974) · postdoctoral research, Rockefeller University · born 1945
Cell Biology Center, Institute of Integrated Research, Institute of Science Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan) ↗
Portrait: Gairdner Foundation
Autophagy had been described in the 1960s and then largely left alone, because nobody could see the genes behind it. Ohsumi's laboratory found them in budding yeast in the 1990s by a deliberately low-technology route: block the vacuolar proteases so that the delivered material piles up instead of being degraded, starve the cells, and look down a microscope for mutants in which nothing piles up. That screen produced the Atg genes and turned autophagy from a phenomenon into a pathway that could be taken apart.
KAM2000 is the point where that work meets this Atlas. Ohsumi is the senior author of the paper showing that TOR holds autophagy shut through Apg13 phosphorylation, and it supplied the mechanism for the TOR control of autophagy that his laboratory had first reported in 1998 (Noda and Ohsumi): the connection the Atlas draws between nutrient sensing and self-digestion starts with this yeast work, and was carried into mammalian cells afterwards.
He received the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy. He has been consistent in public about what the prize does and does not mean for medicine, and the Atlas treats the distinction the same way: the machinery is understood far better than its effect on any human outcome.
Milestones in the Atlas
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2000 | M | Tor-mediated induction of autophagy via an Apg1 protein kinase complex KAM2000 Senior author: TOR controls autophagy through the Apg1/Apg13 kinase complex in yeast, a mechanism for the TOR control of autophagy his laboratory had reported in 1998. |
Co-authors in the Atlas
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Yoshinori Ohsumi.
- Yoshiaki Kamada Showed as first author that TOR keeps autophagy switched off in yeast by controlling the Atg1 (Apg1) kinase complex, and has studied TOR's control of autophagy ever since