The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute has taken a liking to RNA. The committee has awarded two American biologists the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of microRNA, the small RNA molecules that regulate genes, one year after the prize went to scientists who conducted foundational work on mRNA vaccines.
The laureates are Victor Ambros, Ph.D., and Gary Ruvkun, Ph.D. Ambros is a professor at UMass Chan Medical School, while Ruvkun is a professor at Harvard Medical School.
Ambros’ team spent years attempting to identify the nature of lin-4, while Ruvkun’s focused on lin-14. Ambros’ team discovered that the lin-4 gene doesn’t code for an mRNA that becomes a protein, as many other genes do, but instead encodes a small molecule of RNA. The lin-14 gene, on the other hand, does become an mRNA and then a protein. Ambros and Ruvkun knew each other from their postdoctoral researcher days, and shared the sequences of the genes they were working on with each other.
From this collaboration, the researchers realized that there was overlap in the sequences of the lin-4 microRNA and the lin-14 mRNA. In 1993, Ambros’ team published a pivotal paper showing that the lin-4 microRNA binds to the lin-14 mRNA and prevents it from being translated (PDF) into a protein.
It took seven more years for Ruvkun’s group to identify another microRNA, let-7, that is found not only in C. elegans but across the animal kingdom, including in humans. We now know that humans have more than 1,000 types of microRNA and that virtually every gene is regulated at the mRNA level by several microRNAs.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded one-half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”
In 2003, David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein. Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another. On a conference call following the announcement, he said “he is very excited and honoured,” to receive the award.
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed an AI model called AlphaFold2, as part of Google’s DeepMind project, that was able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.
Winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, which went to AI pioneers J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
