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

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNAs. The central dogma of molecular biology says that from genes (DNA) a molecule called messenger RNA is produced (it looks very much like DNA but is not double-stranded and instead of ‘T’ in its sequence it has ‘U’), which is responsible for carrying the information to the cell factories (ribosomes) that produce proteins (haemoglobin, insulin, etc.).

There are several cracks in this dogma, and the above-mentioned researchers discovered one more: there are genes (about 1,000 in the human genome) that do not produce messenger RNA but a smaller RNA (21 to 25 pieces) called microRNAs that do not produce proteins. These microRNAs are the regulators of messenger RNAs: they bind to messenger RNAs by chemical complementarity and inhibit their function. This phenomenon contributes to the fact that, although all cells in the human body have the same DNA sequence, they can produce different amounts of protein: for example, the retina requires high expression of rhodopsin to see, while the skin expresses high levels of keratin.

The laureates' findings were initially described in a worm widely used in laboratories, Caenorhabditis elegans, in 1993; but later in 2000 they also showed that they occurred in humans. We now know that the expression patterns of microRNAs are altered in many pathologies such as cancer and their genes are mutated in some rare diseases. There is also very active pharmacological research to find drugs that act at the level of microRNAs. This is a well-deserved recognition!