Trio win chemistry prize for work that has led to cures for diseases.
STOCKHOLM—Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath on Wednesday won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the atom-by-atom mapping of protein-making factories within cells.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work on ribosomes has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life and has helped researchers develop antibiotic cures for various diseases.
This year's three laureates all generated three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes. "These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering," the academy said.
The researchers used a method called X-ray crystallography to pinpoint the positions of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome. "This knowledge can be put to a practical and immediate use; many of today's antibiotics cure various diseases by blocking the function of bacterial ribosomes," the Nobel citation said. "Without functional ribosomes, bacteria cannot survive. This is why ribosomes are such an important target for new antibiotics."
The scientists' work builds on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and, more directly, on the work done by James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine for mapping DNA's double helix, the citation said.
In 2006, Roger D. Kornberg won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for X-ray structures that showed how information is copied to messenger RNA molecules, which carry information from DNA to the ribosomes.
"Now, one of the last pieces of the puzzles has been added—understanding how proteins are made," said Prof. Gunnar von Heijne of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the chairman of the Nobel committee for chemistry.
The Indian-born Mr. Ramakrishnan, 57 years old, is the senior scientist and group leader at the Structural Studies Division of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. Mr. Steitz, a 69-year-old born in Milwaukee, is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University and attached to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, both in New Haven, Conn. Ms. Yonath, 70, is a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
