Ada Yonath (born 1939) is an Israeli crystallographer and Nobel laureate in Chemistry, best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
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| Ada Yonath at the Weizmann Institute of Science |
The Nobel Prize Organisation says "Ada Yonath was born in Jerusalem, Israel. Her parents had emigrated from Poland. Although her father was a rabbi, her family tried to make a living by running a grocery store. After her father's death, Yonath's family moved to Tel Aviv. After studying chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yonath earned her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science, to which she has maintained her ties as a researcher. Alongside her work there, Yonath has also worked for several European and US universities. Yonath has one daughter.
"An organism's vital functions are managed by large, complex protein molecules produced in cells' ribosomes. There, genetic information from messenger RNA is translated into chains of amino acids that then build proteins. In the 1970s, Ada Yonath began a project that culminated in 2000 in her successful mapping (together with other researchers) of the structure of ribosomes, which consist of hundreds of thousands of atoms, using x-ray crystallography. Among other applications, this has been important in the production of antibiotics."
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