Nobel chemistry completes trilogy

By David Bradley2010-01-01T00:00:00

Source: Shutterstock

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz, and Ada Yonath have won the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry for mapping the ribosome at the atomic level

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory in Cambridge, UK, Thomas Steitz of Yale University, US, and Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have won the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry for their pioneering research on the structure and function of the ribosome - the protein-producing particle inside all cells.

The Nobel committee has described the 2009 chemistry prize as representing a third part in a trilogy that takes us from Darwin's theory of natural selection and evolution to an understanding of life at the molecular level. It was Rosalind Franklin's x-ray images of DNA that led to the 1962 prize for James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins and their atomic model of the double-stranded DNA molecule, and in the 2006, it was x-rays again that showed Roger D. Kornberg how information is copied from DNA to the messenger RNA (mRNA) molecule. The ribosome structure completes the trilogy. The recipients of this year's prize each receive an equal share of the 10 million Swedish krona (ca £ 860,000) prize money for using x-ray crystallography to map the ribosome at the atomic level.

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