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 award to Professors Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun was long overdue. Their work has been key in the discovery of microRNAs, molecules that play a key role in regulating the activity of many of our genes. Furthermore, these discoveries led to the use of microRNAs as disease markers and new therapeutic targets - Dr. Santiago Vernia and Dr. Susana Rodriguez-Navarro work in the field of RNA at the Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia of the CSIC (IBV-CSIC).

It should be noted that these discoveries were largely possible thanks to the choice of the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans for their research. C.elegans is a small (1 mm) nematode that is easy to grow and manipulate in the laboratory but which, at the same time, shares with humans the main tissues and their regulatory mechanisms, constituting a very powerful tool for characterizing fundamental processes in the functioning of our cells -Dr. Nuria Flames and Dr. José Pérez are both specialists in this small model organism-. Similar strategies have already led to other Nobel Prize winners such as Mello & Fire (2006) who also used C.elegans to characterize other processes such as RNA interference, which has given rise to drugs that have already reached the clinic.