The Nobel Prize for Medicine was announced on October 7th - it went to the US scientists V. Ambros and G. Ruvkun for the discovery of gene regulation by short RNA sections, the so-called micro-RNAs.
Interesting fact: As is often the case in the history of human development, new scientific findings sometimes take a little longer to be recognized by experts and the public. The discovery of micro-RNAs in the 1990s was initially dismissed as a curiosity in a worm (the model organism C. Elegans), until the discovery was celebrated around 10 years later as the evolutionary basis of modern gene regulation in all higher organisms, including humans became.
Technical relevance: The importance of gene regulation becomes clear when you consider that humans consist of over 200 different cell types, all of which contain the same genetic information, the DNA - if all cells contain the same information, read and is implemented, then how can, for example, a light-sensitive cell in the eye and the sex cells be so different?
Mechanism: To put it simply, the DNA is first transcribed in the cell nucleus into messengerRNA (mRNA), which is then translated by so-called ribosomes into proteins, which carry out essential tasks in the cells. The microRNAs are inhibitory elements that prevent this process called translation by binding the template, the mRNA, and thus making it inaccessible to the ribosomes. The gene is therefore not translated into an active protein.
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