From fission to fusion: A perspective on the research that won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2013.

ABSTRACT

Secretion is widespread in all eukaryotic cells all of us experience this in the course of daily life – saliva, mucus, sweat, tears, bile juice, adrenalin, etc. – the list is extremely long. How does a cell manage to repeatedly spit out some stuff without losing the rest? The answer is through regulated vesicle trafficking within the cell. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013 was awarded to Drs Randy Schekman, James E Rothman and Thomas C Südhof for their ‘discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells’. Dr Randy Schekman and his colleagues discovered a number of genes required for vesicle trafficking from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and Golgi; the James E Rothman group unravelled the protein machinery that allows vesicles to bud off from the membrane and fuse to their targets; and Dr Thomas C Südhof along with his colleagues revealed how calcium ions could instruct vesicles to fuse and discharge their contents with precision. These enabled the biotechnology industry to produce a variety of pharmaceutical and industrial products like insulin and hepatitis B vaccines, in a cost-efficient manner, using yeast and tissue cultured cells.