The Nobel citation, issued by Sweden's Karolinska Institute, said: "This year's Nobel Laureates have discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information."
In 1998, Dr Mello and Dr Fire with their colleagues (SiQun Xu, Mary Montgomery, Stephen Kostas, Sam Driver) published a paper* in the journal Nature detailing how tiny snippets of RNA dupe the cell into destroying the gene's messenger RNA (mRNA) before it can produce a protein - effectively shutting specific genes down.
This silencing process called RNA interference, or RNAi, has become a widespread research tool and therapeutic lead. Since its initial description, RNAi has been recognized as an underlying process in animals, plants and lower organisms.
Previously, RNA had been thought to have very little role in regulating genes - in fact some thought it nothing more than a by-product.
Dr Mello and Dr Fire's work, which was conducted the research while at the Carnegie Institution, had shown that in fact it plays a key role in gene regulation. The fact that their work had been recognised by the Nobel committee just eight years after it was published indicated just how important it had been. It is very unusual for a piece of work to completely revolutionise the whole way we think about biological processes and regulation, but this has opened up a whole new field in biology.
This ability to dramatically reduce an individual protein inside of cells makes RNAi a valuable research tool. What was once a laborious process is now as easy as sneaking an RNA molecule into the cell with a sequence that matches the RNA a researcher wants destroyed. That ability to one-by-one shut down the production of a given protein in a cell opens up previously impossible areas of research.
Say, for example, a researcher wants to know all the genes involved in a particular cellular event. The researcher can use an RNAi library to individually disrupt each gene from making its protein, then look for the ones that interfere with the event in question.
Another area where scientists have high hopes for RNAi is in developing new RNA-based treatements for disease including a possible therapeutic role for RNAi in gene therapy.
Biography
Fire was born at Stanford Hospital and raised in Sunnyvale, Calif. He received bachelor's in mathematics in 1978 from UC-Berkeley. At the age of 19 he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned his PhD in biology in 1983.
Fire was later a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow in Cambridge, England, where he worked at an MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology group headed by Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner. Between 1986 and 2003, Fire was a staff member of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology in Baltimore.
The initial work on double stranded RNA as a trigger of gene silencing was published while Fire and his group were at the Carnegie Labs. Fire was an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University starting in 1989 and joined the Stanford faculty in 2003. Throughout his career, all of the major work in Fire's lab has been supported by research grants from the US National Institutes of Health.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Sciences. He also serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors and the National Center for Biotechnology, National Institutes of Health.
See also
* Fire A., Xu S.Q., Montgomery M.K., Kostas S.A., Driver S.E., Mello C.C. Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans, Nature 1998; 391:806-811.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/10/02/nobel.medicine.ap/index.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5398844.stm
http://mednews.stanford.edu/releases/2006/october/nobel.html
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2006/press.html
http://www.carnegieinstitution.org/news_releases/PRNobelReleaseFire.html
http://www.umassmed.edu/pap/news/MelloPrize.cfm
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