Click here to view fulltext PDF

Permanent link:
https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/jbsc/039/01/0003-0011

Budding; COPI; COPII; fission; fusion; Nobel Prize 2013; NSF; SNARE; Vesicle traffic

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.

Krishanu Ray¹

1. Department of Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai 400 005, India

Published

March 2014