Your body talks to itself, constantly. It has its own internet in a very real sense. That network of bodily communication is performed via chemicals, like the different varieties of hormones — adrenaline, say — which are sent around to the different cells in the body as instructions. The mechanism behind how cells receive and interpret those chemical messages remained a mystery for most of the 20th century, until the pioneering work of Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian K. Kobilka, recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The pair discovered what’s known as the G-protein-coupled receptor. This is the feature on the surface of cells that senses the presence of a hormone and relays the information to the inside of the cell for an appropriate response. If that hormone is adrenaline, and the receiving cell is part of your heart, that response might be related to beating faster. If that hormone is thyroxine, one of the two thyroid hormones, the recipients are just about every cell in your body. Its messages include things like increasing or decreasing metabolic rate, changing body temperature, regulating bone growth, and onward, depending on the specific cell receiving the hormone.The duo’s research has been a long trudge: Lefkowitz began his work in 1968, attaching radioactive isotopes to hormones such that they became more easily trackable. This revealed the actual receptor and allowed researchers to extract it from the cell wall. The next step, achieved during the ’80s, was to track down the bit of genetic code for the receptor located on the human genome, in the hopes of revealing even more. And that they did: turns out the G-protein-coupled receptor is a lot like the mechanism in the human eye that registers light, making it something of a shared technology. G-protein-couple receptors, of which there are some 1,000 known varieties, also receive messages in the forms of light, flavor, odor, histamine, dopamine, and serotonin.The actual design of the receptor is the sort of brilliance that only four billion years of evolution can provide. It’s a protein that spirals down through the cell membrane, connecting inside the cell to the G protein itself, which, once affected by the changing shape of the receptor, sets off a chain reaction within the cell. Last year, the prize winners caught the whole process in an image for the very first time.Perhaps the the why-you-care bit in this year’s chemistry Nobel is drugs. Drugs are, of course, messages to pieces of your body, crudely impersonating that body’s own messaging system. And many drugs have bad side effects for the reason that they are received by too many receptors — they’re too generic. So a better understanding of receptors means, potentially, better efficiency and safety in drug technology. In the meantime, today’s winners can be found tagging chairs at the Nobel Museum cafe, Bistro Nobel.Reach this writer at michaeb@motherboard.tv.
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