This years Nobel prize in medicine – “Changed the understanding of how genes are controlled”
How are different types of cells formed? Researchers Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were eager to find out. By studying the roundworm C.elegans, they found that a small type of RNA molecule appears to play a crucial role in regulating genes. The discovery was published in 1993 but was met with little interest as the mechanism was assumed to be unique to the C.elegans worm. However, in 2000, Ruvkun’s research team showed that the mechanism is also found in a gene present in both C.elegans worms and humans. We now know that humans have more than a thousand microRNAs.
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery.
“This discovery has fundamentally changed our understanding of how genes are controlled at a post-transcriptional level,” says András Simon, Professor at the Karolinska Institute and member of the Nobel Assembly.
All cells carry the same set of genes. The regulation of these genes determines whether a cell becomes a brain cell, liver cell or skin cell. This regulation can be achieved via microRNAs. By binding to so-called mRNAs, which determine how our proteins are to be built, microRNAs can switch off specific genes.
“These proteins determine what type of cell our cells become, how they function and how they respond to different environmental changes,” says András Simon.
We now know that abnormal levels of microRNAs can also contribute to cancers and other diseases.
“Various cancers have mutations in genes that code for microRNAs.”
How has this discovery changed our understanding of human biology?
“It has changed our understanding of both human biology and, in a much broader evolutionary sense, how multicellular organisms develop.”
“The greater the complexity of an organism, the more specialised functions are required, and new microRNAs evolve as a response to the need for new regulatory processes.”
András Simon emphasises that this year’s Nobel Prize is essentially a physiology prize and that no large-scale standardised treatments using microRNAs are yet available, but that this may come in the future.
“This is such a fundamental principle that controls so many processes that it is very difficult to come up with something highly specific.”
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