American Biologists Win Nobel Prize For The Discovery of microRNA

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US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work on the discovery of microRNA. What is microRNA? Essentially, a molecule that governs how cells in the body function.

Abros and Ruvkun’s research shows how genes can create different types of cells within the body, a process they refer to as “gene regulation. The Nobel Prize committee called this a “groundbreaking discovery” that “revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation.”

Years of work went into the discovery of gene regulation by microRNA, best thought of as a group of molecules that help cells control what type of proteins they create. Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University said of this monuments occasion:

Their discovery… is of fundamental importance to understand how cells work, and thus how organisms develop. This finding was groundbreaking, and has affected more or less all fields of biology and medicine.