Andrew Fire and Craig Mello Win Nobel for RNA Interference Discovery

AP Photo/Michael Probst

From National Public Radio:
Americans Win Nobel for Work in Genetic Therapy
This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to two American researchers, Andrew Fire of Stanford University and Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts. The pair discovered how to selectively silence genes that cause disease.
Their work was published in Nature in 1998:
Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans, by Fire A, Xu SQ, Montgomery MK, Kostas SA, Driver SE, Mello CC. NATURE 391 (6669): 806-811 FEB 19 1998

As of October 2, 2006, this paper has been cited at least 2,503 times, as per Science Citation Index (SCI). A quick search on "rna interference" or rnai resulted in 7,591 records in SCI and 8,428 records in PubMed.

A more recent paper by Mello coauthored with G. Hutvagner and others [Sequence-specific inhibition of small RNA function] appeared in the open access journal PLoS Biology (Public Library of Science) in 2004. It has already been cited at least 72 times.

A search on "rna interference" in the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences online for background information, especially Gregory J. Hannon's article on RNA Interference (RNAi) and MicroRNAs. There are many books related to the subject accessible through the OhioLINK Library Catalog: do a subject search on RNA and limit your search to items published after 2000 for recent titles.