2024 Nobel Prize for Medicine

Miscellaneous


Why in the News?

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. They received this prestigious award for their discovery of microRNA and its significance in post-transcriptional gene regulation. Both Ambros and Ruvkun are biologists from the United States.

MicroRNA (miRNA)

  • It is a class of small, non-coding RNA molecules that play a crucial role in regulating gene expression.
  • They are typically about 21-25 nucleotides long and are involved in various cellular processes.
  • The first known microRNA, lin-4, was discovered in Caenorhabditis elegans (a type of nematode)
  • In the Late 1980s, Ambros and Ruvkun worked under Nobel Prize-winning researcher Robert Horvitz and studied a tiny roundworm called C. elegans.
  • Despite being just 1 mm long, this worm had many of the same cell types found in larger animals, making it an ideal candidate for understanding how tissues develop.
  • Findings revealed that the short RNA from lin-4 matched a specific part of lin-14’s mRNA, allowing it to latch on and effectively turn off lin-14’s protein production.
  • This discovery revealed a new way in which genes could be controlled through tiny RNA molecules now called microRNAs.
  • In 2000, Ruvkun's team found another microRNA, let-7, present in multiple species, including humans.

Gary Ruvkun (Left) and Victor Ambros (Right)