Photo credit: Alain Herzog — File:Ada Yonath.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0
Ada E. Yonath
born 1939 · Israel · 20th century
Nobel Chemistry 2009
Israeli crystallographer who resolved the atomic structure of the ribosome, the cell's protein factory and a key antibiotic target.
Nobel Prize work
Yonath pioneered the crystallisation of ribosomes and, using X-ray crystallography with cryo-cooled crystals, determined their three-dimensional structure at atomic resolution. Her maps revealed how the ribosome reads messenger RNA and catalyses peptide-bond formation, and how antibiotics block it — knowledge now exploited in drug design. Shared with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz.
Fields
Related topics
Protein structure and function
A protein is a sequence that folds into a shape; its surface and flexibility help determine what it can bind or catalyse.
Structure-based drug design
Structure-based design uses a macromolecular structure to generate and test hypotheses about ligand recognition.
Cryo-EM, protein crystallography
Structural biologists infer molecular architecture from scattered electrons or X-ray diffraction, with distinct sample preparation and data-processing limits.