US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun have won the medicine Nobel Prize for discovering tiny molecules that have played a crucial role in human evolution, offering clues to how deadly diseases can be tackled.
The two researchers will share SKr11mn ($1.06mn) for their discovery of micro ribonucleic acid (microRNA) and its involvement in gene regulation, the Nobel Assembly said on Monday as it announced the first of its six annual awards.
Genes are the units of heredity passed from one generation to the next that determine physical and biological characteristics. MicroRNA has proved to be hugely important to understanding how organisms develop and function normally — and what has gone wrong when they do not.