Ada Yonath

Weizmann Institute of Science

Ada Yonath is an Israeli crystallographer and professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she heads the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Assemblies. She was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz, for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Yonath pioneered ribosome crystallography over several decades of painstaking work beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, when many colleagues doubted such complex structures could be crystallized. Her early innovation of cryo-biocrystallography—flash-freezing crystals to minimize radiation damage—became a standard technique in structural biology. She solved the first medium-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits from archaeal and bacterial organisms, providing the first three-dimensional views of ribosomal architecture. The high-resolution structures she contributed to ultimately enabled a molecular understanding of how antibiotics inhibit bacterial ribosomes, laying the foundation for rational antibiotic drug design. Yonath has also contributed to understanding mechanisms of antibiotic resistance at the structural level, informing efforts to design new antibiotics that overcome resistance mutations. She is the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize in science and the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the time of her award. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization, and the Israel Academy of Sciences.