Nobel de Química 2009: estructura atómica de la maquinaria celular para sintetizar proteínas

• Autores: Carlos Fernández Tornero
• Localización: Anales de la Real Academia Nacional de Farmacia, ISSN-e 1697-4298, ISSN 0034-0618, Nº. 1, 2010, págs. 119-138
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, United Kingdom), Thomas Steitz (Yale University, United States) and Ada Yonath (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) for their studies in the structure and function of the ribosome, a macromolecular machine that carries out protein synthesis within the cell. The scientists, in an incredible tour de force that took over twenty years, applied X-ray crystallography in order to determine the atomic structure of this large macromolecular complex, alone and in association with the major components in the protein synthesis process. The resulting models have been essential to understand the mechanisms underlying this process, in particular how the ribosome is able to decode messenger RNA (which carries the genetic information stored in DNA), how peptide bond catalysis proceeds, and the way in which several antibiotics protect us from bacterial infections