Rosalind Lee

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Rosalind Lee
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forDiscovery of microRNA
AwardsNewcomb Cleveland Prize (2003)
Scientific career
Institutions Harvard University
Dartmouth College
UMass Chan Medical School

Rosalind 'Candy' Lee is a biomedical scientist, best known for her breakthrough paper on the discovery of microRNA which was published in 1993. [1] In 2002, Lee was joint recipient of the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, for the best paper published in the journal Science that year. [2] In 2024, Lee's 1993 paper was cited as the seminal discovery for which the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded that year, to co-author Victor Ambros, her husband. [3]

Contents

Career

Lee graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. [4] That same year, she married Victor Ambros, who was at that time a PhD student at MIT. [5]

Lee began working as a research assistant in Victor Ambros' lab in 1987. Her work on the cloning of lin-4 began in January, 1989, in Ambros's lab at Harvard University, and she was joined on the project in the fall of 1989 by Rhonda Feinbaum, a postdoc. [6] [7] Lee and Feinbaum worked for a couple of years in a labor-intensive search for a gene behind a mutation. [8] What they eventually discovered was microRNA, [9] adding a new mechanism for gene regulation. [10] [11] The 1993 paper was soon accepted for publication, and in a change of journal policy, it was published with a notice on the front page that it was jointly first-authored by Lee and Feinbaum, [6] clarifying that both contributed equally to the research. [12] In a 2004 paper, Lee, Feinbaum and Ambros describe how they eventually wrote up the work in 1993, and submitted it to the journal Cell , in parallel with a related paper by Gary Ruvkun. [6]

Lee's co-authored 1993 paper is widely regarded as the seminal contribution in the discovery of microRNA, for which her husband Ambros and Ruvkun were both awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024. [3] The Nobel announcement provoked interest into the question of why Lee hadn't also been recognized with the award. [12]

As of 2024, Lee is a Senior Scientist, in Program in Molecular Medicine, Dr. Victor Ambros's Molecular Medicine Laboratory, at UMass Chan Medical School. [13]

Awards

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine</span> One of five Nobel Prizes established in 1895 by Alfred Nobel

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<i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i> Free-living species of nematode

Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments. It is the type species of its genus. The name is a blend of the Greek caeno- (recent), rhabditis (rod-like) and Latin elegans (elegant). In 1900, Maupas initially named it Rhabditides elegans. Osche placed it in the subgenus Caenorhabditis in 1952, and in 1955, Dougherty raised Caenorhabditis to the status of genus.

microRNA Small non-coding ribonucleic acid molecule

Micro ribonucleic acid are small, single-stranded, non-coding RNA molecules containing 21–23 nucleotides. Found in plants, animals, and even some viruses, miRNAs are involved in RNA silencing and post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. miRNAs base-pair to complementary sequences in messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules, then silence said mRNA molecules by one or more of the following processes:

Howard Robert Horvitz ForMemRS NAS AAA&S APS NAM is an American biologist whose research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phillip Allen Sharp</span> American geneticist and molecular biologist

Phillip Allen Sharp is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence". He has been selected to receive the 2015 Othmer Gold Medal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Craig Mello</span> American biologist (b.1960)

Craig Cameron Mello is an American biologist and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Andrew Z. Fire, for the discovery of RNA interference. This research was conducted at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and published in 1998. Mello has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000.

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The Let-7 microRNA precursor gives rise to let-7, a microRNA (miRNA) involved in control of stem-cell division and differentiation. let-7, short for "lethal-7", was discovered along with the miRNA lin-4 in a study of developmental timing in C. elegans, making these miRNAs the first ever discovered. let-7 was later identified in humans as the first human miRNA, and is highly conserved across many species. Dysregulation of let-7 contributes to cancer development in humans by preventing differentiation of cells, leaving them stuck in a stem-cell like state. let-7 is therefore classified as a tumor suppressor.

lin-4 microRNA precursor

In molecular biology lin-4 is a microRNA (miRNA) that was identified from a study of developmental timing in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. It was the first to be discovered of the miRNAs, a class of non-coding RNAs involved in gene regulation. miRNAs are transcribed as ~70 nucleotide precursors and subsequently processed by the Dicer enzyme to give a 21 nucleotide product. The extents of the hairpin precursors are not generally known and are estimated based on hairpin prediction. The products are thought to have regulatory roles through complete or partial complementarity to mRNA. The lin-4 gene has been found to lie within a 4.11kb intron of a separate host gene.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor Ambros</span> American developmental biologist (born 1953)

Victor R. Ambros is an American developmental biologist and Nobel Laureate who discovered the first known microRNA (miRNA). He is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He completed both his undergraduate and doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ambros received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2024 for his research on microRNA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Ruvkun</span> American geneticist (born 1952)

Gary Bruce Ruvkun is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

MicroRNA sequencing (miRNA-seq), a type of RNA-Seq, is the use of next-generation sequencing or massively parallel high-throughput DNA sequencing to sequence microRNAs, also called miRNAs. miRNA-seq differs from other forms of RNA-seq in that input material is often enriched for small RNAs. miRNA-seq allows researchers to examine tissue-specific expression patterns, disease associations, and isoforms of miRNAs, and to discover previously uncharacterized miRNAs. Evidence that dysregulated miRNAs play a role in diseases such as cancer has positioned miRNA-seq to potentially become an important tool in the future for diagnostics and prognostics as costs continue to decrease. Like other miRNA profiling technologies, miRNA-Seq has both advantages and disadvantages.

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LIN-14 is a nuclear protein that plays a crucial role in regulating developmental timing in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. It functions as a heterochronic gene, controlling the timing of developmental events during larval development. LIN-14 protein levels are high at the beginning of the first larval stage (L1) and then rapidly decline, which is essential for the transition from early to late cell fates. LIN-14 is a BEN domain transcription factor, capable of binding DNA and directly regulating gene expression. The protein's activity is tightly regulated by lin-4, a microRNA which inhibits LIN-14 protein synthesis through complementary base pairing with sequences in the lin-14 mRNA 3' untranslated region.

References

  1. ↑ Lee, Rosalind C.; Feinbaum, Rhonda L.; Ambros, Victor (December 1993). "The C. elegans heterochronic gene lin-4 encodes small RNAs with antisense complementarity to lin-14". Cell. 75 (5): 843–854. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(93)90529-Y. PMID   8252621.
  2. ↑ "Dartmouth Medicine Magazine - Publications". dartmed.dartmouth.edu.
  3. 1 2 "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024". NobelPrize.org.
  4. ↑ "Donors Help to Build STEM Opportunities for Young People". MIT for a Better World.
  5. ↑ "Dr. Paul Janssen Award". Dr. Paul Janssen Award.
  6. 1 2 3 Lee, Rosalind; Feinbaum, Rhonda; Ambros, Victor (January 2004). "A short history of a short RNA". Cell. 116 (2 Suppl): S89–S92. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(04)00035-2. PMID   15055592.
  7. ↑ Sedwick, Caitlin (May 13, 2013). "Victor Ambros: The broad scope of microRNAs". Journal of Cell Biology. 201 (4): 492–493. doi:10.1083/jcb.2014pi. PMC   3653358 . PMID   23671307.
  8. ↑ Gitschier, Jane (March 5, 2010). "In the Tradition of Science: An Interview with Victor Ambrose". PLOS Genetics. 6 (3): e1000853. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000853 . PMC   2832673 . PMID   20221254.
  9. ↑ "Podcast: Victor Ambros on team effort behind Nobel Prize winning discovery of microRNA". UMass Chan Medical School. October 18, 2024. Retrieved October 20, 2024.
  10. ↑ Ambros, Victor (October 17, 2024). "MicroRNA − a new Nobel laureate describes the scientific process of discovering these tiny molecules that turn genes on and off". Lusk Herald. Retrieved October 18, 2024.
  11. ↑ "Victor Ambros '75, PhD '79 and Gary Ruvkun share Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine". MIT News. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. October 7, 2024. Retrieved October 18, 2024.
  12. 1 2 Domínguez, Nuño (October 8, 2024). "Why researcher Rosalind Lee, the wife of the Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, didn't receive the award as well?". EL PAÍS English.
  13. ↑ "Senior Scientist". Dr. Ambros ' s Laboratory Homepage. November 19, 2024.
  14. ↑ Lee, Rosalind C.; Ambros, Victor (October 26, 2001). "An Extensive Class of Small RNAs in Caenorhabditis elegans". Science. 294 (5543): 862–864. doi:10.1126/science.1065329. PMID   11679672 – via CrossRef.
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