Chemistry vials

Earlier today, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to:

  • Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge,United Kingdom
  • Thomas A. Steitz, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
  • Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

“for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.”

These scientists used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

But, what is a ribosome?

(more…)