Winners of Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2009
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This year the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to "for studies on the structure and function of the ribosome which showed that the peptidyl transferase was an RNA catalyzed reaction, and for revealing the mechanism of inhibition of this function by antibiotics".
Ribosome
Biological cell
Diagram of a typical eukaryotic cell, showing subcellular components including ribosomes (3).
Organelles:
(1) nucleolus
(2) nucleus
(3) ribosomes (little dots)
(4) vesicle
(5) rough endoplasmic reticulum (ER)
(6) Golgi apparatus
(7) Cytoskeleton
(8) smooth ER
(9) mitochondria
(10) vacuole
(11) cytoplasm
(12) lysosome
(13) centrioles within centrosome
Ribosomes are complexes of RNA and protein that are found in all cells with nuclei. The ribosome is part of the mechanism that translates the DNA sequence into the protein sequence (proteins are translated from mRNA, mRNA is transcribed from DNA, so DNA is not 'translated' directly into protein). (Wikipedia under GNU License)
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Venki Ramakrishnan) was born 1952 in Tamil Nadu, India. He is an Indian American structural biologist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the Medical Research Council located in Cambridge, England, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Thomas A. Steitz was born August 23, 1940, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Steitz was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Ada Yonath "for his studies on the structure and function of the ribosome which showed that the peptidyl transferase was an RNA catalyzed reaction, and for revealing the mechanism of inhibition of this function by antibiotics".[2] He is married to Joan A. Steitz, also a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale.
Ada E. Yonath was born 22 June 1939. She is an Israeli crystallographer, best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosome. She is director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
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