Ada Yonath
Ada E. Yonath ( born June 22, 1939 in Jerusalem) is an Israeli structural biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. They developed methods for the crystallization of the ribosome, which finally allowed to elucidate the structure down to the atomic level by X-ray structural analysis. As a result, it was able to elucidate the mechanism of action of more than 20 antibiotics. She was awarded along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 "for the studies on the structure and function of the ribosome ".
Career
Ada Yonath (nee Lifshitz ) was born in the Geula neighborhood of Jerusalem. Her parents, Hillel and Esther Lifshitz, were Zionist Jews, who in 1933 from Lodz (Poland ) emigrated to Palestine.
Ada Yonath studied from 1959 chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Following her undergraduate graduation, she studied biochemistry in 1962 and, after receiving the master's degree in 1964 to the Weizmann Institute, where she worked for her dissertation in the field of X-ray crystallography to 1968. After two years' residence at Mellon Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she returned in 1970, first in the Department of Chemistry of the Weizmann Institute back. In 1974 she joined the Department of Structural Chemistry, where she held an associate professor from 1984. Since 1988 she has been Professor of Structural Biology and since 1989 also director of the Kimmel Mann Center for Biomolecular Assemblies at the Weizmann Institute.
Parallel to the activities at the Weizmann Institute Yonath worked as a lecturer at the University of Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion University of the Negev and the Open University of Israel since 1971. She did research among other things at the Dental School of the University of Alabama (1974 ), at the University of Chicago (1977-1978 ) and Heinz -Günter Wittmann at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin- Dahlem ( 1979-1983 ). Wittmann's department dealt with ribosome research. From 1986 to 2004 she led one of the three Max Planck Research Groups at DESY in Hamburg, which had been founded in order to use the synchrotron radiation of DESY for biological structure determination.
Research performance
Ada Yonath is the pioneer of the structural analysis of ribosomes. End of the 70s they started with the X-ray structure analysis of ribosomes, which had been held until then by most researchers because of their size hopeless. The first step is the preparation of a crystal, which meets with the large protein / RNA complexes difficulties. Yonath came up with the idea that ribosomes for the crystallization from the bacterium Geobacillus stearothermophilus to win that lives in hot springs and tolerates temperatures up to 75 ° C. She assumed that because of the ribosomes would form an extremely stable and better crystals. Ribosomes consist of two subunits: 1980 you get the first crystals of the large subunit of the ribosome, although they were still quite impure.
Ada Yonath needed twenty years to generate a picture of the two subunits of the ribosome, where it was clear the position of each atom. To do this, new developing techniques, such as the quick freezing in liquid nitrogen or liquid propane, and the Cryo- ray analysis: exposure of the crystals at 90 to 100 K (about -180 ° C). When it turned out that her path was possible, more and more scientists interested in the area, including Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who were also awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the crystals were good enough to resolve the position of individual atoms in the X-ray structure analysis. However, still presented the " phase problem ". In the scattering of X-ray light creates a pattern of dots and each point of the phase angle has yet to be determined, in principle, a mathematical problem. A common trick is in the crystal element with a high atomic weight, such as iodine, install, and then to repeat the recording. From the comparison of the dot pattern with and without the heavy atoms, the phase angle can be determined. However, ribosomes are so large that they bind to many heavy atoms. This problem was eventually solved by Thomas Steitz. So it was that Thomas Steitz 1998, the first crystal structure of the large subunit of a ribosome published, yet this is not made single atoms.
Almost simultaneously with Steitz, who had edited the large subunit, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Ada Yonath published the structure of the small subunit from Thermus thermophilus. Thus it became possible to understand the function of the ribosome at the atomic level. Ada Yonath dealt in sequence so, how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome of bacteria, and thus block. These works have become the starting point for the development of new antibiotics.
Awards
Ada Yonath is 2000 Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and since 2003 member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, also of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Astronautics since. 2004 Massry Prize and the 2007 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize - for her work in the field of ribosome research their were others 2002 the Israel Prize, and - together with Harry Noller. In addition, she was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2005), the Wolf Prize (2007), the Albert Einstein World Award of Science ( 2008) and - for her life's work - the UNESCO L'Oréal Award for Women in Science (2008). In 2009 it was awarded jointly to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. 2012 she was awarded the honorary doctorate awarded by the Department of Chemistry, University of Hamburg, 2014, the Technical University of Berlin.