Ada Yonath

Ada E. Yonath
Born	(1939-06-22) 22 June 1939 Jerusalem
Nationality	Israeli
Alma mater	Hebrew University of Jerusalem Weizmann Institute of Science
Known for	Cryo bio-crystallography
Awards	Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2006) L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science (2008) Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2009).
Scientific career
Fields	Crystallography
Institutions	Weizmann Institute of Science

Ada E. Yonath (born 1939) (Hebrew: עדה יונת, pronounced [ˈada joˈnat]) is an Israeli crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosome. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 2009, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, becoming the first Israeli woman to win the Nobel Prize out of nine Israeli Nobel laureates, and the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Biography

Yonath was born on June 22, 1939 in the Geula quarter of Jerusalem. Her parents were Zionist Jews who immigrated from Poland to Palestine before the establishment of Israel and her father was a rabbi. They settled in Jerusalem and ran a grocery, but found it difficult to make ends meet. They lived in cramped quarters with several other families, and Yonath remembers not having any books. Despite their poverty, her parents sent her to school in the upscale Beit Hakerem neighborhood to assure her a good education. When her father died at the age of 42, the family moved to Tel Aviv. Yonath was accepted to Tichon Hadash high school although her mother could not pay the tuition. She gave math lessons to students in return. As a youngster, she says her role model was the Polish-French scientist Marie Curie. She returned to Jerusalem for college, graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1962, and a master's degree in biochemistry in 1964. In 1968, she earned a Ph.D. in X-Ray crystallography at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

She has one daughter, Hagit Yonath, a doctor at Sheba Medical Center, and a granddaughter, Noa.

Scientific career

Yonath accepted postdoctoral positions at the Carnegie Mellon University (1969) and MIT (1970). In 1970, she established what was for nearly a decade the only protein crystallography laboratory in Israel. Then, from 1979 to 1984 she was a group leader with Heinz-Guenter Wittmann at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. After returning from a sabbatical year at the University of Chicago, she headed a Max-Planck Institute Research Unit in Hamburg, Germany (1986–2004) in parallel to her research activities at the Weizmann Institute.

Yonath focuses on the mechanisms underlying protein biosynthesis, by ribosomal crystallography, a research line she pioneered over twenty years ago despite considerable skepticism of the international scientific community. Ribosomes translate RNA into protein and because they have slightly different structures in microbes, when compared to eukaryotes, such as humans, they are often a target for antibiotics. She determined the complete high-resolution structures of both ribosomal subunits and discovered within the otherwise asymmetric ribosome, the universal symmetrical region that provides the framework and navigates the process of polypeptide polymerization. Consequently she showed that the ribosome is a ribozyme that places its substrates in stereochemistry suitable for peptide bond formation and for substrate-mediated catalysis. Two decades ago she visualized the path taken by the nascent proteins, namely the ribosomal tunnel, and recently revealed the dynamics elements enabling its involvement in elongation arrest, gating, intra-cellular regulation and nascent chain trafficking into their folding space.

Additionally, Yonath elucidated the modes of action of over twenty different antibiotics targeting the ribosome, illuminated mechanisms of drug resistance and synergism, deciphered the structural basis for antibiotic selectivity and showed how it plays a key role in clinical usefulness and therapeutic effectiveness, thus paving the way for structure-based drug design.

For enabling ribosomal crystallography Yonath introduced a novel technique, cryo bio-crystallography, which became routine in structural biology and allowed intricate projects otherwise considered formidable.

At the Weizmann Institute, Yonath is the incumbent of the Martin S. and Helen Kimmel Professorial Chair.

Awards and honors

Telephone interview with Ada Yonath during the announcement of the Nobel Prize

Yonath is a member of the National Academy of Sciences; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities; the European Academy of Sciences and Art and the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Her awards and honors include the following:

• In 2000, the first European Crystallography Prize;
• In 2002, the Israel Prize, for chemistry;
• In 2006, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (co-recipient with George Feher) "for ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis";
• In 2007, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize;
• In 2008, she became the first Israeli woman to win the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science for her vital work identifying how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics;
• In 2009, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (co-recipient with Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan). She was the first Israeli woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize;
• As well as the Harvey Prize, the Kilby Prize, the Cotton Medal of the US Chemical Society, the Anfinsen Award of the International Protein Society, the Paul Karrer Gold Medal from the University of Zurich, the University of Southern California's Massry Award and Medal, the Datta Medal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies, the Fritz Lipmann Award of the German Biochemical Society and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.

See also

• List of Israel Prize recipients
• List of female Nobel laureates

External links

• The Official Site of Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
• Weizmann Institute of Science, Yonath-Site