Faults in the system can lead to a host of diseases including diabetes and disorders of the immune and nervous systems
The 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three scientists, all based in the United States, for working out how biological cells organise and transport the many molecules they need to function.
In the 1970s and 1980s, James E Rothman, Randy W Schekman and Thomas C Südhof worked on separate aspects of the mechanism by which molecules such as hormones, enzymes and neurotransmitters move around cells in small bubbles of fatty membrane called "vesicles". The three laureates discovered how these packages get to the right parts of the cell at the right times.
Announcing the award on Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the Nobel Assembly's citation read that the award was "for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells". The trio will share 8m swedish krona (£772,000) in prize money.
Prof Schekman, now based at the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, worked out the genetic underpinning of the vesicle manoeuvres, using yeast as his model organism. On being woken up with the news of his prize at 1:30am local time on Monday by the Nobel Prize committee, he said: "My first reaction was, 'Oh, my god!'. That was also my second reaction."
Prof Rothman, currently a professor and chairman in the department of cell biology at Yale University, discovered the complex protein structures (pdf) that allow the vesicles to fuse with their targets and off-load their molecular cargo.
Prof Südhof, born in Germany and now based at Stanford University in California, focused his work on nerve cells, uncovering the cellular signals that make the vesicles release their molecular cargo precisely.
Errors in this exquisitely tuned cell transport mechanism can lead to a host of problems including diabetes and disorders of the immune and nervous systems.
Responding to the news of the three new Nobel laureates, Dame Jean Thomas, vice-president of the Royal Society, said: "Their seminal work on the transport and delivery of 'cargo' within and between cells (relevant to the release of insulin, signalling between neurons, signalling in the immune system and other processes) has provided fundamental insights into cellular processes and is also highly relevant to understanding various disease processes. The Society offers its warm congratulations to all three."
Like many Nobel laureates before them, today's winners have already collected a haul of major scientific accolades between them. Prof Südhof won the 2013 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, which was also won jointly by Profs Schekman and Rothman in 2002. Profs Südhof and Rothman were joint winners of the 2010 Kavli Prize for neuroscience, and Prof Schekman was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society earlier this year.
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