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ShareLondon: Tamil Nadu-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 along with two others, the Nobel Committee announced today.
Born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Ramakrishnan shares the Nobel with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel) for their "studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".
Ramakrishnan earned his BSc in Physics (1971) from Baroda University and his PhD in Physics (1976) from Ohio University.
He moved into biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he took a year of classes, then conducted research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist.
With this 5.5 Angstrom-resolution structure, Ramakrishnan's group identified key portions of the Ribonucleic acid (RNA), and using previously determined structures, positioned seven of the subunit's proteins.
In the September 21, 2000 issue of Nature, Ramakrishnan published two papers. In the first of these, he presented the 3 Angstrom structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit.
His second paper reveals the structures of the 30S subunit in complex with three antibiotics that target different regions of the subunit. In this paper, Ramakrishnan discusses the structural basis for the action of each of these drugs.
After his postdoctoral fellowship, Ramakrishnan joined the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US. There, he began his collaboration with Stephen White to clone the genes for several ribosomal proteins and determine their three-dimensional structures.
He was also awarded a Guggenheim fellowship during his tenure there, and he used it to make the transition to X-ray crystallography.
Ramakrishnan moved to the University of Utah in 1995 to become a professor in the Department of Biochemistry.
There, he initiated his studies on protein-RNA complexes and the entire 30S subunit.
He later moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he is a senior scientist and group leader in the Structural Studies Division. He joins the list of several Nobel laureates who worked at the laboratory.
"This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath for having shown what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level," the Nobel committee said in its citation.
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, it said.
"This year's three laureates have all generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. 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 citation said.
Better known as 'Venky' among friends, Ramakrishnan started out as a theoretical physicist. After graduate school, he designed his own 2-year transition from physics to biology.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since.
In the August 26, 2000 issue of Nature, Ramakrishnan and his co-workers published the structure of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus, a heat-stable bacterium related to one found in the Yellowstone hot springs.
Ramakrishnan has authored several important papers in academic journals.
