Two American scientists were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology on Monday for their groundbreaking work on the behavior of genes.
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered microRNA, which the Nobel Assembly described as “a fundamental principle that determines how gene activity is regulated.”
The small microRNA molecules play a crucial role in determining how different cells – which have the same chromosomes, which is essentially their manual – have different characteristics.
The pair tried to investigate how, for example, nerve cells and muscle cells have very different characteristics, despite having the same genetic information.
“The answer lies in gene regulation, which allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions,” Nobel’s announcement said. And the newly discovered microRNA is essential for all multicellular organisms to do this, including humans.
“Their surprising discovery revealed an entirely new dimension of gene regulation. MicroRNAs appear to be fundamental to the way organisms develop and function,” the Nobel Committee said.
In the 1980s, Ambros and Ruvkin studied a 1 mm roundworm, which contained many specialized cell types.
Although now considered groundbreaking, their published results were “initially met with an almost deafening silence from the scientific community,” the Nobel Prize said, while many other scientists concluded they were not relevant to humans and complex animals.
But later research, including the discovery of another microRNA in 2000, has proven that there are more than a thousand genes for different microRNAs in humans.
Ambros, 70, born in Hanover, New Hampshire, received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979 and is now Silverman Professor of Natural Science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts
Born in Berkeley, California, in 1952, Ruvkun received his PhD from Harvard University in 1982 and is now a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
