STOCKHOLM: Two Americans and an Israeli shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry for showing how ribosomes function, work that has important implications for antibiotics, the prize committee said on Wednesday.
The prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) recognised Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath for showing how the ribosome, which produces protein, functions at the atomic level.
"As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics," the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
This was the third of this year's Nobel prizes, following awards for medicine or physiology on Monday and for physics on Tuesday.
Prizes for the sciences and for peace were established in the will of 19th century dynamite tycoon Alfred Nobel and have been handed out since 1901. Sweden's central bank began awarding a prize for economics in 1969.
Backgrounder: Recent winners of Nobel Prize in chemistry
The following is a list of winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry since 2000:
2009: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz (U.S.), and Ada E. Yonath (Israel);
2008: Osamu Shimomura (Japan), Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien (U.S.);
2007: Gerhard Ertl (Germany);
2006: Roger D. Kornberg (U.S.);
2005: Yves Chauvin (France), Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock (U.S.);
2004: Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko (Israel), Irwin Rose ( U.S.);
2003: Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon (U.S.);
2002: John B. Fenn (U.S.), Koichi Tanaka (Japan) and Kurt Wuthrich (Switzerland);
2001: William S. Knowles (U.S.), Ryoji Noyori (Japan) and K. Barry Sharpless (U.S.);
2000: Alan Heeger (U.S.), Alan G. MacDiarmid (U.S. and New Zealand) and Hideki Shirakawa (Japan).
