Ada Yonath: The Future of Structural Biology - Schrödinger at 75: The Future of Biology

Ada Yonath , the Martin S. and Helen Kimmel Professor of Structural Biology, at Weizmann Institute, is an Israeli protein crystallographer who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with Indian-born American physicist and molecular biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and American biophysicist and biochemist Thomas Steitz, for her research into the atomic structure and function of cellular particles called ribosomes. Yonath received her BA in chemistry in 1962 and MSc in biochemistry in 1964 from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She then attended the Weizmann Institute of Science as a graduate student, studying X-ray crystallography and receiving a PhD in 1968. After a brief stint as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., Yonath joined the department of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow. There she began investigating the structure of ribosomes using X-ray crystallography and pioneered the development of new approaches to the study of structural characteristics of large, complex molecules. Yonath has been working in the department of chemistry at the Weizmann Institute since 1970. She became director of the Mazer Center for Structural Biology and was later director of the Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly. She also served as head of the Max Planck Research Unit for Ribosomal Structure in Germany (1986–2004). In 1980 Yonath became the first person to determine the three-dimensional atomic arrangement of a large ribosomal subunit (ribosomes consist of two distinct subunits, one large and one small). She conducted these early studies using ribosomes from the bacterium Bacillus stearothermophilus. Her subsequent research revealed the complex architecture of ribosomes, and she identified structures resembling tunnels, through which newly synthesised polypeptide chains were passed during protein synthesis. Yonath was elected a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2000 and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2003. In addition to the 2009 Nobel Prize, she received numerous other honours and awards throughout her career, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry in 2005, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in 2007, and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 2008.