Yoshinori Ohsumi has won the 2016 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology for his discovery of mechanisms for degrading and recycling cellular components.
"Ohsumi's discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content," the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement on Monday in awarding the prize of 8 million Swedish crowns ($A1.2 million).
"His discoveries opened the path to understanding ... many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection," the statement added.
