By Haaretz Service

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1119429.html

Israeli scientist Ada Yonath, a leading researcher in the structural biology field, was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday, the Nobel committee in Stockholm announced. Yonath shares the prize with Britain’s Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz, an American, for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.

Yonath has focused her research on the structure of the ribosome, a part of the cell that synthesizes protein and translates genetic code in the production of protein.

Yonath was the first Israeli biologist to work with NASA in sending research material to outer space. She cooperated with NASA on 12 missions. Her research contributed greatly to the development of more effective antibiotics, which can overcome phenomenon of drug resistant pathogens.

Yonath is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the prize.

“I’m really, really happy,” Yonath said after being informed of her victory. “I thought it was wonderful when the discovery came. It was a series of discoveries…We still don’t know every, everything, but we progressed a lot.”

Yonath is a professor and head researcher in the field of structural biology and biochemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.

She has won many prizes for her research in recent years, including the Israel Prize in Chemistry and the Wolf Prize in Chemistry.

This year’s three laureates all generated three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes.

“These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the academy said in its announcement.
“All three have 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,” the academy said.

Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, established the Nobel Prizes in his will in 1895. The first awards were handed out six years later.

Each prize comes with a 10 million kronor [$1.4 million] purse, a diploma, a gold medal and an invitation to the prize ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. The Peace Prize is handed out in Oslo.

Israeli physicist Yakir Aharonov lost the Nobel Prize for physics, despite predictions that he was likely to win. The committee awarded the the physics prize to engineers who developed the mechanism used in digital photography, preferring to award the prize to practical technology that could be used on a daily basis rather than the theoretical physics which Aharonov focused on.

The last Israeli to receive a Nobel Prize was Yisrael Robert Aumann, who was awarded the prize in economics in 2005 for his work on conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis. He shared the prize with Thomas Schelling.