Venkatraman wins Nobel

Cambridge/Ahmedabad
Oct. 7: Indian-born American scientist Dr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.

Dr Ramakrishnan, 57, who was born in Chidambaram of Tamil Nadu, shares the prize with Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

They demonstrated what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at an atomic level using a visualisation method called X-ray crystallography. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms.

Dr Venkatraman’s studies will in the long run enable better targeting of antibiotics that work by blocking the ability of bacteria to make the proteins it needs to function. The shy and modest Dr Venkatraman initially thought it was a prank when he was informed that he had won the Nobel.

“I didn’t actually believe it,” he said. “It was quite a shock initially. I only believed it after talking to the other people in the room at the Swedish Academy.”

Dr Ramakrishnan, who is a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Sciences in Bengaluru, said he had been working for a long time on the problem of how a cell takes information encoded in the gene and uses it to make protein. “We wanted get the structure of these atomic sub-units,” he said. “It was in the mid-1990s that technology had advanced enough to enable us to do that. It was in 2000 that the structure for both halves of ribosome became determined.”

Revealing his India connection, Dr Venkatraman, who is called Venki by his colleagues, said he did his schooling and pre-university college in India, before moving to the US. He has has a doctorate from the Ohio University.

Source::DC