Nobel prize awarded for the discovery of microRNA and its role in gene regulation

Key takeaways:

• Victor R. Ambros, PhD, and Gary Ruvkun, PhD, have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• Today, it is known that there are more than a thousand genes for different microRNAs in humans.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to Victor R. Ambros, PhD, and Gary Ruvkun, PhD, for the discovery of microRNA and its role in gene regulation.

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden announced the honor today.

The pair’s discovery “revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans,” according to a press release from the committee, while the findings “are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.”

Last year, the Nobel Prize went to scientists whose work contributed to the development of mRNA vaccines, which were quickly rolled out during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to background information from The Ohio State University, microRNAs control gene expression — the process in which information encoded in a gene is turned into a function — by binding with messenger RNA in the cell cytoplasm.

Ambros, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, published their findings of a microRNA called lin-4 in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans in 1993.

However, the discovery initially received little attention from the scientific community because the lin-4 gene existed only in C. elegans and was considered “likely irrelevant to humans and other more complex animals,” the release noted.

Ruvkun’s research group later published the discovery of another microRNA, the let-7 gene, in 2000.

“Unlike lin-4, the let-7 gene was highly conserved and present throughout the animal kingdom,” the release said. “The article sparked great interest, and over the following years, researchers identified hundreds of different microRNAs.”

Ultimately, gene regulation by microRNA “has enabled the evolution of increasingly complex organisms” across millions of years, according to the release. “Today, we know that there are more than a thousand genes for different microRNAs in humans, and that gene regulation by microRNA is universal among multicellular organisms.”

References:

• MicroRNA. Available at: https://cancer.osu.edu/microrna. Accessed Oct. 7, 2024.
• Press release. Available at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2024/press-release/. Published Oct. 7, 2024. Accessed Oct. 7, 2024.