This year’s Nobel Prize honours Ambros and Ruvkun for their discovery of a key principle controlling gene activity.

The work by Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun is “proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function,” according to a panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm.

Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation