Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024 awarded jointly to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.
"This year’s Nobel Prize honors two scientists for their discovery of a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated", according to the Nobel Prize Committee.
They added: This year’s Nobel Prize focuses on the discovery of a vital regulatory mechanism used in cells to control gene activity. Genetic information flows from DNA to messenger RNA (mRNA), via a process called transcription, and then on to the cellular machinery for protein production. There, mRNAs are translated so that proteins are made according to the genetic instructions stored in DNA. Since the mid-20th century, several of the most fundamental scientific discoveries have explained how these processes work.
According to the BBC Science Unit, "Their work helped explain how our genes work inside the human body.
Their discoveries help explain how complex life emerged on Earth and how the human body is made up of a wide variety of different tissues.
MicroRNAs influence how genes - the instructions for life - are controlled inside organisms, including us."
Victor R. Ambros (born 1953, Hanover, New Hampshire) is an American developmental biologist who discovered the first known microRNA (miRNA). He is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. (Wikipedia)
Gary Bruce Ruvkun (born March 1952,
Berkeley, California)
[1] is an
American molecular biologist at
Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of
genetics at
Harvard Medical School in
Boston.
[2] Ruvkun discovered the mechanism by which
lin-4, the first
microRNA (miRNA) discovered by
Victor Ambros, regulates the translation of target messenger RNAs via imperfect base-pairing to those targets, and discovered the second miRNA,
let-7, and that it is conserved across animal phylogeny, including in humans. (Wikipedia)
The winners share a prize fund worth get 11m Swedish kronor (£810,000).
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