Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Early birds and the worm: How discovery of microRNA in C. elegans revolutionized biology

Roni Saiba

IMSc Chennai

How does the same genome give rise to cell types as different as the neuron and muscle? How does a cell regulate the amount of protein depending on external stimuli? The answer to these questions is gene regulation. For a long time, transcription factors were considered the major regulators of gene expression. However, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who jointly won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, discovered microRNAs which are another avenue of gene regulation. Their discovery of microRNAs and its associated protein machinery has provided a versatile and targeted genetic toolkit to molecular biologists resulting in further groundbreaking developments. In this talk, I will go over their early publications on the identification of microRNAs and also highlight recent research which has used
microRNAs.