MIT alumnus Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79 and Gary Ruvkun, who did his postdoctoral coaching at MIT, will share the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medication, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences introduced this morning in Stockholm.
Ambros, a professor on the College of Massachusetts Chan Medical College, and Ruvkun, a professor at Harvard Medical College and Massachusetts Normal Hospital, had been honored for his or her discovery of microRNA, a category of tiny RNA molecules that play a vital position in gene management.
“Their groundbreaking discovery revealed a totally new precept of gene regulation that turned out to be important for multicellular organisms, together with people. It’s now recognized that the human genome codes for over one thousand microRNAs. Their shocking discovery revealed a completely new dimension to gene regulation. MicroRNAs are proving to be essentially essential for the way organisms develop and performance,” the Nobel committee mentioned in its announcement right this moment.
Through the late Eighties, Ambros and Ruvkun each labored as postdocs within the laboratory of H. Robert Horvitz, a David H. Koch Professor at MIT, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002.
Whereas in Horvitz’s lab, the pair started finding out gene management within the roundworm C. elegans — an effort that laid the groundwork for his or her Nobel discoveries. They studied two mutant types of the worm, often called lin-4 and lin-14, that confirmed defects within the timing of the activation of genetic applications that management growth.
Within the early Nineteen Nineties, whereas Ambros was a school member at Harvard College, he made a shocking discovery. The lin-4 gene, as an alternative of encoding a protein, produced a really brief RNA molecule that appeared to inhibit the expression of lin-14.
On the similar time, Ruvkun was persevering with to check these C. elegans genes in his lab at MGH and Harvard. He confirmed that lin-4 didn’t inhibit lin-14 by stopping the lin-14 gene from being transcribed into messenger RNA; as an alternative, it appeared to show off the gene’s expression in a while, by stopping manufacturing of the protein encoded by lin-14.
The 2 in contrast outcomes and realized that the sequence of lin-4 was complementary to some brief sequences of lin-14. Lin-4, they confirmed, was binding to messenger RNA encoding lin-14 and blocking it from being translated into protein — a mechanism for gene management that had by no means been seen earlier than. These outcomes had been printed in two articles within the journal Cell in 1993.
In an interview with the Journal of Cell Biology, Ambros credited the contributions of his collaborators, together with his spouse, Rosalind “Sweet” Lee ’76, and postdoc Rhonda Feinbaum, who each labored in his lab, cloned and characterised the lin-4 microRNA, and had been co-authors on one of many 1993 Cell papers.
In 2000, Ruvkun printed the invention of one other microRNA molecule, encoded by a gene referred to as let-7, which is discovered all through the animal kingdom. Since then, greater than 1,000 microRNA genes have been present in people.
“Ambros and Ruvkun’s seminal discovery within the small worm C. elegans was surprising, and revealed a brand new dimension to gene regulation, important for all complicated life varieties,” the Nobel quotation declared.
Ambros, who was born in New Hampshire and grew up in Vermont, earned his PhD at MIT underneath the supervision of David Baltimore, then an MIT professor of biology, who obtained a Nobel Prize in 1973. Ambros was a longtime school member at Dartmouth School earlier than becoming a member of the college on the College of Massachusetts Chan Medical College in 2008.
Ruvkun is a graduate of the College of California at Berkeley and earned his PhD at Harvard College earlier than becoming a member of Horvitz’s lab at MIT.