Two American scientists have gained the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Drugs for the invention of microRNA “and its position in post-transcriptional gene regulation,” the Nobel committee introduced Monday.
Victor Ambros, who’s affiliated with the College of Massachusetts Medical Faculty, and Gary Ruvkun, who’s at Harvard Medical Faculty, shared the prize for his or her work in advancing the understanding of how gene exercise is regulated, in line with a press launch.
Ambros and Ruvkun sought to know how various kinds of cells—say, muscle versus nerve—develop, on condition that all of them comprise the identical chromosomes with the identical set of directions. They found “a brand new class of tiny RNA molecules,” the Nobel committee wrote, which interprets DNA into the correct proteins wanted for every kind of cell.
“Having a primary understanding is in fact step one in the direction of creating functions,” immunologist Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam, chair of the Nobel committee, mentioned within the announcement. “Though there aren’t any very clear functions accessible but with microRNAs, understanding them, figuring out that they exist, understanding their regulatory networks is all the time step one.”
