Reacción a "Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology awarded to Ambros and Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNAs and their role in gene regulation"

This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to the two American scientists who discovered the regulation of gene expression mediated by microRNAs: Professors Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun. Although all the cells in our body have the same genome (the same genes), not all genes are active in all of them. One of the keys to understanding health and disease is the understanding of the mechanisms that govern which genes and to what degree they should be active at any given time in each cell, known as gene expression. In this regard, the awardees' work studying regulatory elements in the development of a small laboratory worm initiated the discovery of a previously unknown broad mechanism of regulation in living organisms.

These researchers discovered that genomes also produce very small RNA molecules (microRNAs) that regulate the expression levels of most genes by binding to specific sequences present in messenger RNAs. Since their discovery in 1993, more than 1,000 human microRNA genes have been identified, and the work of a multitude of laboratories has revealed that these molecules are involved in the regulation of virtually every aspect of our body, including aging, as our laboratory has shown.