Two U.S. scientists, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, won the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation, the awarding body said on Monday.

Their finding is "proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function," the Nobel Assembly said.

Ambros conducted the studies that earned him the prize at Harvard University. However, he currently teaches natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ruvkun is a professor at Harvard Medical School and affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel committee for physiology, said he had reached Ruvkun by phone, waking him up early in the morning, but he was eventually happy and "very enthusiastic." He had not yet reached Ambros, he said.

In the late 1980s, Ambros and Ruvkun undertook postdoctorate studies in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, who was a Nobel Prize winner in 2002, studying a 1-millimeter-long roundworm.

They discovered how certain microRNAs in the roundworm govern the growth of organs, an ability that was initially dismissed as specific to the species.

More work published by Ruvkun's research group in 2000 showed that all animal life had relied on the mechanism for more than 500 million years.

MicroRNA comes into play when single-strand messenger RNA, the subject of last year's Nobel Prize in medicine, is decoded and used to make proteins, the building blocks of all human and animal life.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, in turn, emerges from the universal blueprint in every cell nucleus, the double-helix DNA.

As in every year, the physiology or medicine prize was the first announced in the crop of Nobel prizes, arguably the most prestigious prize in science. The remaining five are set to be unveiled over the coming days.

Created in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes have been awarded for breakthroughs in science, literature and peace since 1901, while economics is a later addition.

(With input from Reuters)