ANKARA

 The 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday has been jointly awarded to scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, the Nobel Assembly in Sweden announced.

They were awarded "for the discovery of the microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation,” the assembly said.

Victor Ambros, a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, were both born in the US in 1953 and 1952, respectively, the institute said on its website.

It said in the late 1980s, the scientists "were postdoctoral fellows in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002."

They "wanted to identify the mutated genes and understand their function" by examining a 1-millimeter-long roundworm, C. elegans, a "useful model for investigating how tissues develop and mature in multicellular organisms," the assembly said.

Ambros and Ruvkun then went on to further develop their research separately.

Victor Ambros conducted his research at Harvard University, while Ruvkun conducted his at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Their “surprising discovery revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation,” the Nobel Assembly said.

“MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function,” it said.