Medicine Nobel for microRNA
The 2024 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to geneticists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that help to control how genes are expressed in multicellular organisms. (miRNA is not to be confused with messenger RNA (mRNA), which became a household name because of its application to vaccines against COVID-19 and won a Nobel prize last year.) In the 1990s, the laureates identified genes that encoded microRNAs in the roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans. For years, the discovery was viewed as a quirk unique to roundworms, with little relevance to other organisms. The discovery that microRNAs are conserved across the tree of life caused the field to explode.
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