Ada Yonath won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studies of the structure and function of ribosomes.
Yonath shared the prize with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz. Using X-ray crystallography, the researchers mapped ribosomes, the molecular machines that read messenger RNA and assemble proteins.
Her work helped clarify how antibiotics bind to bacterial ribosomes and block protein production. That made ribosome structures valuable not only for basic biology but also for designing and understanding antibacterial drugs.
Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939 and became the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize. Ribosomes are found in all living cells, but bacterial and human ribosomes differ, allowing some antibiotics to target bacteria more selectively.