This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to the U.S. researcher James Rothman and Randy Schekman and the German Thomas Südhof. They have discovered how cells organize the transport of substances with the help of tiny transport vesicles.
cells are like tiny factories. They produce materials for their own needs but also export this and also import other substances. But how do they ensure that the right substances – for example, the hormone insulin or neurotransmitters in the brain – at the right time at the right place and there are also added? Or that an enzyme only in a specific organelle of the cell – so hot their bodies – is effective? For the discovery and elucidation of this transport system that sends the substances in tiny, membrane-coated vesicles (called vesicles) obtained two U.S. and German researchers this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology – James Rothman, of Yale University, Randy Schekman of the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Südhof from Stanford University.
The transport vesicles can be compared with chemical vans. They shield their cargo during transport by a membrane similar to the cell membrane carefully from. They recognize their destination with the help of special Andockproteine: Both the target and they even carry the vesicles in the membrane. They fit together, they combine like two halves of a zipper. Subsequently, both membranes fuse approximately as water bubbles on the water surface fit again. This melting is not automatically place but precisely only when a timer of the molecular target cell is the signal for it. The same principle also works in the docking of a cell when an organelle is the goal. Because the organs of the cell are also surrounded by a membrane. Randy Schekman discovered the first evidence for the logistics system of the cells when he examined yeast cells in the seventies. In compartments he found strange accumulations of small vesicles. As it turned out, they were the result of mutations that led to a transport jam. Later in the eighties and nineties, James Rothman identified in mammalian cells, the Andockproteine for the bubbles and realized how the merging worked. The German Thomas Südhof ultimately inte! rested in the communication between nerve cells. The signaling molecules used for this purpose (called neurotransmitters) are also sent in vesicles from one neuron to the next. Südhof explained in nerve cells, the nature of the molecular timer to: Only when an influx of calcium ions takes place, the target cell triggers the fusion process of Medical therapies can not yet be inferred from the findings.. But more and more knowledge about faults in cellular transport system have helped to understand the emergence of serious neurological and metabolic diseases and diagnose it. In addition, explain the research results of Rothman and Schekman Südhof, like bacterial toxins – such as the tetanus and botulinum toxin – act. Both damage the cell transport so strong that it results in death. <- AUTHOR MARKER DATA BEGIN -> <-! RSPEAK_STOP -> (vsz)
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