London, Oct 7: Tamil Nadu-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a senior scientist at the MRC Laborartory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 along with two others, the Nobel Committee announced on Wednesday.
Born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Ramakrishnan shares the Nobel prize with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel) for their "studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".
Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc. in Physics (1971) from Baroda University and his Ph.D. 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.
"This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath for having showed 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.
Ramakrishnan has authored several important papers in academic journals.
In the August 26, 2000 issue of Nature, Ramakrishnan and his coworkers published the structure of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus, a heat-stable bacterium related to one found in the Yellowstone hot springs.
With this 5.5 Angstrom-resolution structure, Ramakrishnan's group identified key portions of the 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 presents 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 ther 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 since 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.
India’s other Nobel connections
1. In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change headed by India’s R K Pachauri shared the Nobel prize in peace with Al Gore.
2. V S Naipaul, Trinidad-born British writer of Indian origin, won the Nobel prize in literature in 2001.
3. Abdus Salam, born in undivided Punjab and a citizen of Pakistan, shared the Nobel prize in physics in 1979 with Steven Weinberg for his work on electroweak unification, one of the important puzzles of modern theoretical physics.
4. British author Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1865, won the Nobel prize in literature in 1907.
5. Ronald Ross, born in Almora, Uttarakhand, in 1857 was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria. He was a British citizen.
