This is a crucial mechanism in the functioning of cells that the Nobel committee highlighted on Monday, October 7: the control of genetic activity by very small molecules, called “micro-RNA.” The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awards two pioneering American biologists in this field: Victor Ambros, 70, and Gary Ruvkun, 72.
Both come from this Nobel nursery that houses the prestigious universities, concentrated around Boston, in Massachusetts. Victor Ambros, now at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, conducted his award-winning research at Harvard. Gary Ruvkun developed his work at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he is still a professor of genetics.
We must understand the fundamental importance of these processes in controlling genetic activity. They are what allow our cells to carry out their infinite specialized functions, within the different tissues of our body: for example, the absorption of nutrients by the cells that line the intestine; the “firing” of certain neurons in response to specific stimuli; insulin secretion by pancreatic cells; or even the contraction of muscle cells…
Let us remember here how a “classical” gene works, that is, a gene that provides instructions to the cellular machinery to manufacture proteins, those elementary elements that form the structure of cells and guarantee their functions. First step, the DNA sequence (the sequence of DNA letters) written in each gene serves as a template for the production of a complementary molecule, messenger RNA (a nucleic acid, like DNA). The second step is equally crucial: each messenger RNA is “translated” into a specific protein, according to a genetic code that earned the Nobel Prize to its three discoverers, Robert Holley, Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall Nirenberg, in 1968.
Model organism
“It has long been believed that genetic activity is essentially controlled during the transcription stage, when messenger RNA is produced from the DNA sequence of genes.”explains Marie-Anne Félix, CNRS research director at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. It will be the entire merit of Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, the duo awarded today, to reveal the importance of a completely different pathway: that of microRNAs, which are also nucleic acids, but very small in size (only about twenty). Chemical letters.
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