Described Structure and Function of Life’s Protein-Making Factory
|
|
(HealthNewsDigest.com) – New Haven, Conn. — Thomas Steitz, M.D., Sterling professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and professor of chemistry at Yale University, is one of three winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work describing the structure and function of the ribosome, the protein making factory key to the function of all life, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden announced today.
Steitz, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, shares the $1.4 million award with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom and Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. All three used a technology 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. The knowledge of the ribosome has created targets for a new generation of antibiotics.
The instruction manual for the creation of proteins is DNA, but the ribosome is the machine which takes information transcribed onto messenger RNA and turns it into proteins. Steitz’ recent work has focused on a subunit of the ribosome, which has proved to be a major target for antibiotics.
His close collaboration with Yale faculty colleague Peter Moore and interactions with William Jorgenson led to the establishment of a company, Rib-X Pharmaceutical, Inc., which is using this knowledge of the structures of the large ribosomal subunit and its antibiotic complexes to create new classes of antibiotics.
Steitz was born in 1940 in Milwaukee and received a degree in molecular biology and biochemistry in 1966 from Harvard University.
A press conference with Professor Steitz will be held at noon in the President’s Room on the second floor of Woolsey Hall, corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven.
Subscribe to our FREE Ezine and be eligible for Health News, discounted products/services and coupons related to your Health. We publish 24/7.
HealthNewsDigest.com
We also create, produce and distribute tv/cable public service campaigns: HealthyTelevisionProductions