Israeli scientist Ada Yonath, 70, was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry along with two American scientists for mapping ribosomes, the protein-producing factories within cells, at the atomic level.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the work of Yonath, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life and has helped researchers develop antibiotic cures for various diseases.
Yonath is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the prize. She is also the first researcher from the Weizman Institute to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
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 in its announcement.
Indian-born Ramakrishnan, 57, heads the structural studies division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.
Steitz, 69, is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. — jpost.com