Two Californians share 2013 Nobel in Medicine

UC Berkeley's Randy Schekman will share this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
UC Berkeley's Randy Schekman will share this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. UC Berkeley

Two California scientists and a Yale researcher will share the 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for groundbreaking work in cell transport, says the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. (Complete list).

The winners are Yale's James E. Rothman, UC Berkeley's Randy W. Schekman, and Thomas C. Südhof, an investigator at Stanford.

James Rothman, Yale. Yale University

The Nobel Committee said before dawn Monday that, "The 2013 Nobel Prize honours three scientists who have solved the mystery of how the cell organizes its transport system. Each cell is a factory that produces and exports molecules. For instance, insulin is manufactured and released into the blood and chemical signals called neurotransmitters are sent from one nerve cell to another. These molecules are transported around the cell in small packages called vesicles. The three Nobel Laureates have discovered the molecular principles that govern how this cargo is delivered to the right place at the right time in the cell."

Thomas C. Südhof, Stanford Stanford University

The Committee provided the text below to explain this year's award more fully. It is presented verbatim.

How cargo is transported in the cell


Traffic congestion reveals genetic controllers

Randy Schekman was fascinated by how the cell organizes its transport system and in the 1970s decided to study its genetic basis by using yeast as a model system. In a genetic screen, he identified yeast cells with defective transport machinery, giving rise to a situation resembling a poorly planned public transport system. Vesicles piled up in certain parts of the cell. He found that the cause of this congestion was genetic and went on to identify the mutated genes. Schekman identified three classes of genes that control different facets of the cell´s transport system, thereby providing new insights into the tightly regulated machinery that mediates vesicle transport in the cell.

Docking with precision

James Rothman was also intrigued by the nature of the cell´s transport system. When studying vesicle transport in mammalian cells in the 1980s and 1990s, Rothman discovered that a protein complex enables vesicles to dock and fuse with their target membranes. In the fusion process, proteins on the vesicles and target membranes bind to each other like the two sides of a zipper. The fact that there are many such proteins and that they bind only in specific combinations ensures that cargo is delivered to a precise location. The same principle operates inside the cell and when a vesicle binds to the cell´s outer membrane to release its contents.


