Medicine Nobel: They found tiny RNA and how it regulates life’s complexity

The Nobel Prize in Physiology honors Ambros and Ruvkun for discovering microRNA, key to gene regulation and vital for cellular functions and evolution.

NEW DELHI

This photo combo shows 2024 Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine Gary Ruvkun, American molecular biologist, left, and Victor Ambros, professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, on Monday. (AP)

A muscle cell, a nerve cell or any other kind of living cell, for that matter, expresses different kinds of proteins. Yet the genetic information in the DNA of all cells of an organism is identical. How, then, does each cell know what kinds of proteins to express, so that it can perform its specialised functions?

The answer lies in the precise regulation of gene activity, which involves processes that science has been decoding over the last few