Ada Yonath

Ada Yonath (1939) is an Israeli crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosome. Born in Jerusalem, she is the director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute.

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Biography

Yonath earned her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and accepted postdoctoral positions at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University.

In 1970, she established what was for nearly a decade, the only protein crystallography laboratory in Israel. After returning from a sabbatical year at the University of Chicago, during 1986 - 2004 she headed a Max-Planck Research Unit in Hamburg, Germany, in parallel to her research activities at the Weizmann Institute.

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

Yonath has a sister, a daughter, and a granddaughter (Noa).

Yonath's science

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. 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.^[1]

Awards

Yonath is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA; 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 Israel Prize, the first European Crystallography Prize (in 2000), NIH Certificate of Distinction, the Harvey Prize, the Kilby Prize, the Cotton Medal of the US Chemical Society, the Anfinsen Award of the International Protein Society, the Zurich University's Paul Karrer Gold Medal, 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.

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