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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Second year in a row for mRNA, interesting.

What I love about these announcements is how good they are at explaining the concept. Click the "Press release" or "Advanced information" and get something easily digestible. Also fun to watch the talks the winners hold, they're often good at explaining.

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microRNA is abbreviated miRNA.

mRNA provides the blueprint for constructing proteins based on the genetic information stored in DNA.

miRNAs are small regulatory RNAs that control gene expression by interacting with mRNA, influencing whether certain proteins are produced or not.

Why not μRNA, damn it!

oh well, can't edit my message now, but then: interesting that RNA is twice in a row. (Not sure I deserved the amount of downvotes, though, mRNA is mentioned twelve times in the press release as well, easy to confuse for a layman)

Don’t take it personal. By mistake you created a comment that is stating a blatant falsehood. And people are downvoting that blatant falsehood. That’s a statement it the fact that the comment is false. It’s not an attack on your person, it doesn’t matter if it was a small or big mistake that lead to that comment existing, because the comment is there and is false, people will downvote it, as they should.

Is there really a need for an abbreviation that cuts off 3 characters of an 8 character word? Feels like the risk of getting it mixed up with mRNA outweighs in. Then again, that mixup might happen even if microRNA wasn't abbreviated. Or maybe I shouldn't count the abbreviation under the assumption that RNA is already abbreviated?

mRNA = messenger RNA; miRNA = microRNA, which is the subject of 2024's Nobel

mRNA = messenger RNA

miRNA = microRNA

tRNA = transfer RNA

rRNA = ribosomal RNA

siRNA = small interfering RNA

Interesting… at least in my field, the prefix “micro” gets abbreviated with a “u” since it looks very close to the lowercase Greek letter μ (mu), as “micro” itself is Greek in origin

In this case, the phrase micro does mean the metric prefix 10^-6, but just "smaller than mRNA". The important unit in biology is nucleotides [1], which are the elements specifying the composition of proteins (loosely speaking, the "atoms of biology"). mRNA typically has on the order of thousands of nucleotides, whereas miRNAs have about 20 nucleotides. The physical size of miRNAs is actually ~3nm. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3500609/

Yes, but it’s quite common to use “micro” to mean “small” in some technical fields. Example: Microprocessor

Typically I see “u” used in instances where it is the actual SI Unit prefix for 10^-6, and leaving it as “mirco” is used when in its more common form for “very small”

The only exception i can think of off hand is "uP" as a very rare abbreviation for "microprocessor": https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/microprocessor

micro-operation in a CPU is uop.

was thinking the same. it could be mi instead of u because the other one are not size related

These probably this joke is about, Every Scientific Field:

https://xkcd.com/2986/

Good one, but not really applicable here. Everyone in the greater domains of biology, biochemistry, bioengineering, and medicine (and maybe more) should know all of these types of RNA

mtRNA = mitochondrial RNA

In Web framework terms, DNA is a message schema that generates messages (mRNA) which can have microDNA applying direct injection to disable certain fields so that the receiving micro service produces a different result.

This is not a good analogy.

I thought it was ok actually, what part is bad?

They famously botched the Bell’s inequality summary two years ago.

Who is "they" here? There are completely separate committees for each subject's Nobel prize.

Edit: the individual committees are even not all run by the same institution [0]. The medicine prize committee is run from the Karolinska institute, whereas the physics committee, for example, is run by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

[0] https://www.nobelprize.org/the-nobel-prize-organisation/priz...

That’s too much inside-baseball for my taste. All committees are under the Nobel prize umbrella.

Check out Sean Carroll on the subject:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230224123835/https://twitter.c...

mRNA ≠ microRNA

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