2024 Nobel Prize Lectures in Physiology or Medicine

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun recount how studies of developmental timing in the nematode C. elegans revealed a new mechanism for regulating genes. The lectures follow the genetic analysis of lin-4 and lin-14, the discovery that a regulatory gene could produce a short non-coding RNA, and the connection between that RNA and complementary sequences in a target messenger RNA. They then examine how the discovery of additional microRNAs, including conserved regulators, changed a seemingly specialised worm finding into a widespread principle of gene regulation. The programme explains how small RNAs influence protein production after transcription and how experiments in a model organism exposed a regulatory system important across multicellular life.