DNA gets all the glory, but genetic material wouldn’t be anywhere without ribosomes — cellular protein factories that build everything from insulin to fingernails. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced October 7 that three scientists will share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for unmasking the structure of the ribosome. The work enriched fundamental research on proteins, shed light on how life got going on Earth and is leading to the development of new antibiotics.
Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, shares the prize with Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Thomas Steitz of Yale University and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. The researchers will share equally the prize of 10 million Swedish kronor (1.42 million dollars).
By the 1960s, scientists had figured out that the instructions encoded in a cell’s DNA were transcribed into RNA. In cells with DNA sequestered in a nucleus, this messenger RNA, or mRNA, brings the instructions out of the nucleus into the cell’s cytoplasm (in bacteria and other non-nucleated cells, everything happens in the cytoplasm). Then ribosomes get to work. The two chunks of a ribosome, the large and small subunits, bind together, and with the help of other RNA molecules, the ribosome builds the specified proteins, be they hemoglobin or hair.