The Backstory: An interview with Candy Lee on the discovery of microRNAs

7/25/2025

MicroRNAs are short single-stranded RNAs (21-23 nucleotides long) that can base pair to complementary sequences in messenger RNAs. This is a post-transcriptional mechanism to regulate gene expression that has been conserved during evolution. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNAs.

Rosalind (Candy) Lee has been a member of the Ambros lab since 1987. She is the co-first author of the 1993 paper describing the unusual product of the lin-4 locus in C. elegans, the first described microRNA. This discovery was born from developmental biology studies of cell lineages in the nematode, C. elegans. The discovery of microRNAs is yet another example of how developmental biology studies using a model organism have led to important discoveries in biomedical research. Richard Behringer (SDB President-Elect) interviewed Candy Lee to learn about her contributions to the discovery of microRNAs.

These studies were initially pursued using a single worm mutant called e912. In the early 1970’s, Dr. Padmanabhan Babu isolated the e912 mutant while performing a mutagenesis screen in C. elegans in Sydney Brenner’s lab at Cambridge University. e912 mutants had a vulva-less phenotype, indicating altered cell lineages. The consequence of these abnormalities was a “bag of worms” phenotype in which eggs are fertilized but cannot be laid and remain inside, hatch and consume their mother. Dr. Babu’s discovery of the e912 mutant led to developmental biology studies by others that identified a fundamental mechanism of gene regulation. See Padmanabhan Babu and the isolation of the e912 mutant (lin-4).

Richard Behringer interviewed Rosalind (Candy) Lee October 29, 2024 before the Nobel Prize Ceremony in December.

Ambros Family at Nobel Ceremony (Left to Right: Andrew Lee, Victor Ambros, Rosalind Candy Lee, Matthew Ambros, and Gregory Ambros)

 

 

 

Last Updated 08/05/2025