Newswise The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that Randy W. Schekman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, Thomas C. Sdhof, an HHMI investigator at Stanford University, and James E. Rothman of Yale University are the recipients of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.

According to the Royal Swedish Academy, this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine honors 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.

Schekman discovered a set of genes that were required for vesicle traffic. Rothman unraveled protein machinery that allows vesicles to fuse with their targets to permit transfer of cargo. Sdhof revealed how signals instruct vesicles to release their cargo with precision.

Through their discoveries, Rothman, Schekman and Sdhof have revealed the exquisitely precise control system for the transport and delivery of cellular cargo. Disturbances in this system have deleterious effects and contribute to conditions such as neurological diseases, diabetes, and immunological disorders.

Randy W. Schekman

Traffic inside a cell is as complicated as rush hour near any metropolitan area. But drivers know how to follow the signs and roadways to reach their destinations. How do different cellular proteins "read" molecular signposts to find their way inside or outside of a cell?

For the past three decades, Randy Schekman has been characterizing the traffic drivers that shuttle cellular proteins as they move in membrane-bound sacs, or vesicles, within a cell. His detailed elucidation of cellular travel patterns has provided fundamental knowledge about cells and has enhanced understanding of diseases that arise when bottlenecks impede some of the protein flow. Schekman has been an HHMI investigator since 1991. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the open access research journal eLife.

His work earned him one of the most prestigious prizes in science, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, which he shared with James Rothman in 2002.

Schekman's path to award-winning researcher began with a youthful enthusiasm for science and math, which he attributes to his father, an engineer who helped develop the first online program for real-time stock quotes. High school science fairsand winning themfurther whetted his appetite for competitive science. Biology's power hit him more personally, though, when his teenage sister died of leukemia.

He considered pursuing medical school as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles. But after spending his junior year in a laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, his path to graduate school became set. He obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Stanford in the laboratory of Arthur Kornberg, who won the Nobel Prize in 1959 for identifying a key enzyme in DNA synthesis.

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Schekman, Sudhof Awarded 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine