Nobel Prize 2024 week is here! With the announcement of the Nobel in Medicine or Physiology, a week of announcements commences.
Based on the announcement made by the Nobel Committee on Monday, the Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun "for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation".
The two scientists have been awarded for their work to understand how gene activity is regulated. With their groundbreaking research, the two American biologists discovered microRNA - which is a new class of tiny RNA molecules.
As per Amrbos and Ruvkun, the discovery of the microRNA revealed a " completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans."
Victor Ambros is a Professor in the programme in Molecular Medicine and a Silverman Professor of Natural Scienceworks at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the United States.
Gary Ruvkun is a professor of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School and is also affiliated to the Massaschusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Ruvkun and Ambros discovered in 1992 that the first microRNA - lin-4 - regulates the translation of a target gene, lin-14, to which it base pairs with the loops and bulges that are common in folded RNAs.
The second microRNA was discovered at the Ruvkun Lab at Harvard in 2000. Amrbos and Ruvkun have contributed majorly to the study of microRNA, resulting in the field to grow from two back-to-back papers in 1993 to over 100,000 references in 2021.
In 2024, the medicine laureates made a seminal discovery in the small worm C. elegans and revealed a new dimension to gene regulation, which is now essential for all complex life forms.
