Photo credit: US Embassy Sweden — File:Nobel Laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Chemistry).jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
born 1952 · United Kingdom, India, United States · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2009
Indian-born structural biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, later president of the Royal Society, who solved the structure of the ribosome's small subunit.
Nobel Prize work
Using X-ray crystallography he determined the atomic structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit and its complexes with antibiotics, revealing how the ribosome reads mRNA and how drugs block bacterial protein synthesis. The work, shared with Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath, explained the ribosome's function and guided antibiotic design.
Fields
Related topics
Replication, transcription, translation
Cells copy genetic material, transcribe selected DNA segments into RNA, and translate messenger RNA into polypeptides.
Cryo-EM, protein crystallography
Structural biologists infer molecular architecture from scattered electrons or X-ray diffraction, with distinct sample preparation and data-processing limits.