The Nobel prize for chemistry has been jointly awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (MRC Cambridge), Thomas Steitz (Yale) and Ada Yonath (Weizmann Institute, Israel) for their work determining the structure of ribosomes. The ribosome is an important component of cells that assembles proteins from amino acids. It is often referred to as “the protein factory”. This is the second Nobel prize to be awarded for work on ribosomes as Albert Claude, Christian de Duve and George Emil Palade were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, in 1974 for their discovery.
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Structure and shape of the E.coli 70S ribosome.