Yonath, Ada E. << YOH naht, AH dah >> (1939-…), an Israeli scientist, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work in producing images of bacterial ribosomes. Ribosomes are the parts of a cell that assemble proteins (see Cell (Producing proteins) ). Yonath specializes in X-ray crystallography, the practice of producing images of molecules by condensing them into crystals and bombarding them with X rays. Yonath shared the prize with two other ribosome researchers, the American biochemist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and the American biochemist Thomas Steitz.
A ribosome is a complex of proteins and other molecules consisting of many thousands of atoms. Producing a crystal of such a large structure is quite difficult. Further, X-ray crystallography can only produce images of individual atoms if the crystals are composed of molecular structures arranged in exactly the same orientation.
In the late 1970’s, Yonath began trying to crystallize a ribosome. A ribosome consists of two parts, called the large subunit and the small subunit. In 1980, Yonath produced the first crystal of the large subunit. However, it took another 10 years to approach the quality of crystal needed to show each atom. Steitz eventually became the first to image each atom in the large subunit. Yonath and Ramakrishnan, working separately, became the first to show each atom in the small subunit. The three scientists’ work enabled people to study the function of ribosomes at the atomic level. This research has contributed to many fields, including antibiotic research, medical research, and pharmaceutical research.
Yonath was born on June 22, 1939, in Jerusalem, Israel. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1962 and her master’s degree in biochemistry in 1964, both from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1968, she received her Ph.D. degree in X-ray crystallography from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovat, Israel. She accepted postdoctoral positions at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1969 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in 1970. Later in 1970, she returned to the Weizmann Institute where she established the first protein crystallography lab in Israel. She remained at the Weizman Institute throughout her career, holding several positions. From 1979 to 1984, she also did research at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany. From 1986 to 2004, she headed a research unit at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, Germany, while also continuing research at the Weizmann Institute.
See also Ramakrishnan, Venkatraman ; Steitz, Thomas Arthur .
