Ribosomes earned Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.
Ribosomes are molecular machines that build proteins by reading messenger RNA and linking amino acids in the required order. They consist of ribosomal RNA and proteins and are found in all living cells. Their detailed structures showed how genetic information is translated into functional proteins.
The laureates used techniques including X-ray crystallography to determine ribosomal structures at high resolution. Their work also clarified how several antibiotics bind to bacterial ribosomes and interfere with protein production. Ribosomes in bacteria differ from those in human cells, which helps explain why some antibiotics can target bacteria more selectively than human tissues.