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Cell Biology Advances and Computational Techniques Earn Nobels for NIGMS Grantees

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The winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine discovered that cells import and export materials using fluid-filled sacs called vesicles. Credit: Judith Stoffer.
The winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine discovered that cells import and export materials using fluid-filled sacs called vesicles. Credit: Judith Stoffer.

Every October, a few scientists receive a call from Sweden that changes their lives. From that day forward, they will be known as Nobel laureates. This year, five of the new Nobelists have received funding from NIGMS.

In physiology or medicine, NIGMS grantees James Rothman (Yale University) and Randy Schekman (University of California, Berkeley) were honored “for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.” They share the prize with Thomas C. Südhof of Stanford University.

Rothman and Schekman started out working separately and in different systems—Schekman in yeast and Rothman in reconstituted mammalian cells—and their conclusions validated each others’. It’s yet another example of the power of investigator-initiated research and the value of model systems.

Highly accurate molecular models like this one are based on computational techniques developed by the winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Credit: Rommie E. Amaro, University of California, San Diego.
Highly accurate molecular models like this one are based on computational techniques developed by the winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Credit: Rommie E. Amaro, University of California, San Diego.

The three Nobelists in chemistry are NIGMS grantees Martin Karplus (Harvard University), Michael Levitt (Stanford University) and Arieh Warshel (University of Southern California), who developed “multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” They used computational techniques to obtain, for the first time, detailed structural information about proteins and other large molecules. Because of that work, scientists around the world are now able to access, with a few keystrokes, highly accurate models of nearly 100,000 molecular structures. Studying these structures has advanced our understanding of countless diseases, pharmaceuticals and basic biological processes.

Learn more:

NIGMS Nobel Prize News Announcement
NIGMS Nobelists Fact Sheet