The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2024 was awarded to two American scientists: Professor Victor Ambros of the Medical School at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester and molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun of Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston, "for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional regulation of genes." As stated in the press release of the Nobel Committee, their groundbreaking discovery revealed a completely new, vital regulatory mechanism used by cells to control gene activity. MicroRNAs have proven to be fundamentally important for the development and functioning of multicellular organisms, including the human body — today it is known that the human genome encodes more than a thousand microRNAs. The work of these Nobel laureates opened a completely new dimension in our understanding of gene activity regulation.
Why these results are interesting and important and how they were obtained are explained in their article for the journal "Bulletin of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine" by scientists from the Palladin Institute of Biochemistry of the NAS of Ukraine: senior researcher, candidate of biological sciences Svitlana Romanyuk and the director of this academic scientific institution, member of the Presidium of the NAS of Ukraine, academician of the NAS of Ukraine Serhiy Komisarenko.