Invitations to Eminent Scientists for Diversity

Dear Professor Yoshinori Ohsumi

An invitation to a Nobel Prize winner scientist to ILLUMINATION as a guest writer for autophagy and its immunity effects

Dear Professor Yoshinori Ohsumi,

大隅良典教授、

I hope that you are doing well, sir.

We are honored by your contributions to science.

Background

We know that you have been active in several research areas since 1988. You focused your efforts on protein degradation in the vacuole, an organelle that corresponds to the lysosome in human cells.

As recorded in the prestigious Nobel literature, you reasoned that if you could disrupt the degradation process in the vacuole while the process of autophagy was active, then autophagosomes should accumulate within the vacuole and become visible under the microscope.

My understanding from the literature, you cultured mutated yeast lacking vacuolar degradation enzymes and simultaneously stimulated autophagy by starving the cells. Your results were striking, as pointed out by the Nobel assembly and documented in the announcement report.

The Nobel committee, based on your studies, recorded that within hours, the vacuoles were filled with small vesicles that had not been degraded. The vesicles were autophagosomes and your experiment proved that autophagy exists in yeast cells. But even more importantly, you now had a method to identify and characterize key genes involved in this process. Your work was a major breakthrough in medical science and you published your results in 1992.

It was inspiring to read from the Nobel literature that you took advantage of your engineered yeast strains in which autophagosomes accumulated during starvation. This accumulation should not occur if genes important for autophagy were inactivated.

You exposed the yeast cells to a chemical that randomly introduced mutations in many genes, and then you induced autophagy. Your strategy worked. Within a year of your discovery of autophagy in yeast, you had identified the first genes essential for autophagy.

In your subsequent series of elegant studies, the proteins encoded by these genes were functionally characterized. Your results showed that autophagy is controlled by a cascade of proteins and protein complexes, each regulating a distinct stage of autophagosome initiation and formation.

Reason for Invitation

I know you are a busy scientist, especially with your tenure as a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Therefore, I will keep this invitation letter short and focus on my reason for inviting you to our publication as a guest contributor.

Like many scientists and technologists, I am also inspired by the remarkable research you are conducting on autophagy. Your well-deserved Nobel Prize in 2016 was a prime example of the importance of this topic for humanity.

I made a humble attempt to introduce the topic to our readers on a content platform. As my article was not distributed to the topics for unknown reasons, the story did not gain as much visibility as I intended to.

Another writer in our publication (Dr Joel Yong, PhD), who is a biochemical scientist and engineer, wrote about the topic yesterday our publication, but his illuminating story was not distributed to the topics either.

We are stuck in creating visibility for this wonderful topic on social media. Therefore, I am reaching out to you.

It may sound trivial, but the disheartening part for me was the spell-check of the content platforms seeing the term “autophagy” as a misspelled word.

Considering your honorable mission for society, I want to cut a long story short, and as the leader of our publication, I would like to kindly invite you to join our publication as a guest writer.

In the meantime, I invite some of our health experts who write for our publication. We can amplify your messages collectively for the benefit of humanity. Our publication has a mission for diversity, synergy, and fusion through serendipity. Your honorable participation in our mission can be a serendipitous encounter for our writers and readers.

We would be honored if you could kindly join us and illuminate our writers and readers. I look forward to your support of our publication, sir.

If you write in Japanese, it is no problem for us. We have several Japanese-speaking writers who can translate your insightful messages into English.

Yours Sincerely,

敬具

Dr Mehmet Yildiz, founder and leader of ILLUMINATION — Contact

Citations

Ichimura, Y., Kirisako T., Takao, T., Satomi, Y., Shimonishi, Y., Ishihara, N., Mizushima, N., Tanida, I., Kominami, E., Ohsumi, M., Noda, T. and Ohsumi, Y. (2000). A ubiquitin-like system mediates protein lipidation. Nature, 408, 488–492

Tsukada, M. and Ohsumi, Y. (1993). Isolation and characterization of autophagy-defective mutants of Saccharomyces cervisiae. FEBS Letters 333, 169–174

Mizushima, N., Noda, T., Yoshimori, T., Tanaka, Y., Ishii, T., George, M.D., Klionsky, D.J., Ohsumi, M. and Ohsumi, Y. (1998). A protein conjugation system essential for autophagy. Nature 395, 395–398

Takeshige, K., Baba, M., Tsuboi, S., Noda, T. and Ohsumi, Y. (1992). Autophagy in yeast demonstrated with proteinase-deficient mutants and conditions for its induction. Journal of Cell Biology 119, 301–311

Nobel Prize Winners 2016 [Physiology or Medicine] — https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/press-release/

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