Copenhagen/The 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology goes to Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of micro-RNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm reported this Monday.
“This year’s Nobel Prize honors two scientists for their discovery of a fundamental principle that governs the regulation of gene activity,” the Swedish Academy explained as soon as the award was announced.
Thus, Amros and Ruvkun became interested in how different cell types develop and discovered micro-RNAs, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play “a crucial role” in gene regulation.
“Their revolutionary discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans. It is now known that the human genome encodes more than a thousand microRNAs,” he highlights.
“Their revolutionary discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans”
Understanding the regulation of gene activity has been an important goal for many decades.
Abnormal regulation can contribute to cancer, diabetes or autoimmunity. In humans, mutations have been detected in genes that encode microRNAs, causing conditions such as congenital hearing loss and eye and skeletal disorders.
“This year’s Nobel Prize focuses on the discovery of a vital regulatory mechanism used in cells to control the activity of genes,” underlines the statement, which specifies that genetic information passes from DNA to messenger RNA (mRNA) through a process called transcription, and from there to the cellular machinery for protein production.
There, mRNAs are transformed so that proteins develop according to the genetic instructions stored in DNA.
In the 1960s it was shown that specialized proteins, known as transcription factors, can bind to specific regions of DNA and control the flow of genetic information by determining which mRNA is produced.
Since then, thousands of transcription factors have been identified, and it was long believed that the fundamental principles of gene regulation had been resolved.
However, in 1993, this year’s Nobel laureates published unexpected findings describing a new level of gene regulation, which turned out to be highly significant and conserved throughout evolution.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine is the first in the round of these prestigious awards, which will be followed by the announcements in successive days of those in Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace and finally that of Economics, next Monday.
