BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Chemistry with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”

The 2024 #NobelPrize laureates in chemistry Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have successfully utilised artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins. In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic. Read more about their story: bit.ly/3XI7KK3

The 2024 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine focuses on the discovery of a vital regulatory mechanism used in cells to control gene activity. Genetic information flows from DNA to messenger RNA (mRNA), via a process called transcription, and then on to the cellular machinery for protein production. There, mRNAs are translated so that proteins are made according to the genetic instructions stored in DNA. Since the mid-20th century, several of the most fundamental scientific discoveries have explained how these processes work. In 1993, this year's Nobel Prize laureates published unexpected findings describing a new level of gene regulation, which turned out to be highly significant and conserved throughout evolution. They discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation. Read more: bit.ly/4dlPE6f

MicroRNA genes have evolved and expanded within the genomes of multicellular organisms for over 500 million years. Today, we know that there are more than a thousand genes for different microRNAs in humans, and that gene regulation by microRNA – discovered by this year’s medicine laureates – is universal among multicellular organisms. #NobelPrize