Three scientists won the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology for their discovery on how exactly cells shuttle around materials.
Americans James Rothman and Randy Schekman, along with Thomas Sudhof, from Germany, shared the most coveted prize in the science world after they found the way that "vesicles" act as a transporter, moving certain goods to different locations, according to the BBC. These actions are necessary for the brain to communicate with other parts of the body, portions of the immune system, and distributing hormones. Vesicles are small globules of fat that move enzymes, neurotransmitters and hormones around cells. They can also combine with the surface of the cell and spew their innards into the larger body. These cells which make up the body are stuffed with very particular contents - in order for a cell to work correctly, it must be equipped with the right stuff, and must move into the right place at the perfect time.
"Without this wonderfully precise organization, the cell would lapse into chaos," the prize committee reported on the discovery of the cells. They said the findings "had a major impact on our understanding of how cargo is delivered with timing and precision within and outside the cell."
These findings also imply that people with such ailments as diabetes and brain disease suffer from a broken vesicle transport system, the BBC reported.
According to Dr. Lisa Swanton of the University of Manchester, the vesicles work "like a postman's bag, they have to get to a specific address. They have worked out the mechanism of sending to the right location, they have advanced the field enormously.
"They have revolutionized understanding of how cells are organized which is fundamental to huge number of diseases," Swanton told the BBC.
Rothman, a professor from Yale University, found that certain proteins function as docks for the vesicles. Randy Schekman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, noticed that the mutations in three genes that monitor transport systems in yeast looked like a "situation resembling a poorly planned public transport system."
After Schekman heard that he'd won the award, he had two responses: "My first reaction was 'Oh my God!' That was also my second reaction."
