Congratulations to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, 2024 The Nobel Prize Laureate for Medicine or Physiology, for their major discovery in gene regulation! 🥂
This year’s medicine laureates Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered a new principle of gene regulation, mediated by a previously unknown type of RNA, microRNA. They published their results in 1993 but were initially met with almost deafening silence from the scientific community. Although the results were interesting, the unusual mechanism of gene regulation was considered likely irrelevant to humans and other more complex animals. That perception changed in 2000 when Ruvkun's research group published their discovery of another microRNA that was highly conserved and present throughout the animal kingdom. Ruvkun's article sparked great interest, and over the following years, hundreds of different microRNAs were identified. Today, we know that there are more than a thousand genes for different microRNAs in humans, and that gene regulation by microRNA is universal among multicellular organisms. Intriguingly, a single microRNA can regulate the expression of many different genes, and conversely, a single gene can be regulated by multiple microRNAs, thereby coordinating and fine-tuning entire networks of genes. The 2024 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. Learn more Press release: https://bit.ly/4dEie37 Advanced information: https://bit.ly/3Y2fiIZ