Yoshinori Ohsumi: Autophagy from beginning to end

A utophagy is a process by which cellular components are captured into organelles called autophago-somes and then brought to the lysosome or vacuole to be broken down and recycled for other uses. It frequently comes into play during starvation, allowing cells to survive periods of privation. Yoshinori Ohsumi survived privation while growing up in post–World War II Ja-pan and struggled to establish his own course of independent research. But he persevered and went on to make key early discoveries in the fi eld of autophagy (1, 2). In his work, he has identifi ed most of the proteins and pathways involved in the process (3), demonstrated how they are regulated by proteins that sense cells' metabolic states (4), and started to outline the fi ne mechanistic details of autophagosome formation in yeast (5, 6). In spite of all his successes , he was surprised by our request for an interview but nevertheless happy to speak with us about his work from his offi ce at Tokyo Institute of Technology. How did you decide to go into a research career? I was probably infl uenced by my father, who was a professor of engineering at Kyushu University. I was familiar with academic life while I was growing up. But whereas my father worked in a very industrially oriented fi eld, I was more interested in the natural sciences. In high school I was interested in chemistry, so I entered the University of Tokyo to learn chemistry. I quickly discovered chemistry wasn't so attractive to me, because the fi eld was already quite established. But I was lucky, I think, because the early 1960s was the golden age of molecular biology. I decided I wanted to work on that instead. There were not very many molecular biology labs in Japan at that time. I joined Dr. Kazutomo Imahori's lab as a graduate student to study protein synthesis in E. coli. Unfortunately, I did not get very good results in my work, and, when I had fi nished my graduate studies, I discovered it was very diffi cult to fi nd a good position in Japan. So, on Dr. Imahori's advice, I took a postdoc-toral position with Dr. What did you work on there? That was the hardest time in my life. [Laughs] As a graduate student I had worked on E. coli, but in Dr. Edelman's lab I switched to working on …