Ramakrishnan, Venkatraman (1952-…), an American biochemist, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work with bacterial ribosomes. Ribosomes are the parts of a cell that assemble proteins (see Cell (Producing proteins) ). Ramakrishnan studied the structure and function of ribosomes using X-ray crystallography. In X-ray crystallography, scientists produce images of molecules by condensing them into crystals and bombarding them with X rays. Ramakrishnan shared the prize with two other ribosome researchers, the American biochemist Thomas Steitz and the Israeli crystallographer Ada Yonath.
A ribosome consists of two parts, called the large subunit and the small subunit. Both subunits consist of several large molecules bound together into a single structure. In 2000, Ramakrishnan and Yonath, working separately, became the first to produce an image of the small subunit that revealed the individual atoms in the structure. That same year, Steitz had revealed the atomic structure of the large subunit.
Soon after revealing the structure of the small subunit, Ramakrishnan began studying how ribosomes work in detail. Scientists knew that the “instructions” for making a protein are carried by a strand of the molecule RNA (ribonucleic acid). The strand of RNA acts like a blueprint that the ribosome “reads” in assembling the protein. By studying the ribosome’s newly discovered atomic structure, Ramakrishnan was able to determine the chemical processes involved in ”reading” the RNA. This work has important applications in antibiotic, medical, and pharmaceutical research.
Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, India in 1952. In 1971, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. In 1976, he received a Ph.D. degree in physics from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He then spent two years studying biology at the University of California at San Diego. In 1978, he began his study of ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He then moved on to the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, in 1983. In 1995, he became a professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In 1999, he went to work at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.
