Stockholm - Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath have won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, it was announced in Stockholm on Wednesday. Ramakrishnan and Steitz are US citizens, Yonath is from Israel.
The trio were cited "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome" one of the core processes in life, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Ribosomes produce proteins that control the chemistry in all living organisms. The Academy said the ribosome translates the DNA code into life, and said it could be likened to "the cell's own protein factory."
The three laureates used so-called X-ray crystallography to chart the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.
The three shared the prize worth 10 million kronor (1.4 million dollars) but had worked independently of each other, the Academy said.
Their research is used by scientists hoping to develop new antibiotics.
About half of the current antibiotics in use block the function of bacterial ribosomes, but there is also a growing problem of bacterial strains resistant to drugs, the Academy said.
Yonath, who is with the department of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said the discovery was made some seven, eight years ago, and she "did not expect" the prize, she told Swedish radio's science desk.
Steitz, professor of molecular biophysics at Yale University, Connecticut, said he was preparing to go the gym when the call with the prize announcement came from Stockholm.
"My caller from Stockholm said I shouldn't go to the gym. There would be phone calls," Steitz, born 1940, told Swedish radio's science desk.
Steitz added that a few years ago he had founded a company that was developing antiobiotics based on the finds.
Ramakrishnan, born 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, is with the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University.
He said he had not had time to inform his wife about the news when he was reached by Swedish radio's science desk.
The chemistry prize was the third of this year's Nobel Prizes to be announced following the medicine prize on Monday and the physics prize Tuesday.
