Ada Yonath
Personal Profile
Ada Yonath
Birth Name:
Ada E. YonathDate of Birth:
June 22, 1939Zodiac Sign:
CancerPlace of Birth:
Geula, JerusalemSex:
FemaleNationality:
Israeli
Family
Ada Yonath
Career
Ada Yonath
Awards
Ada Yonath
2000 : The first European Crystallography Prize
2002 : The Israel Prize, for chemistry
2006 : The Wolf Prize in Chemistry
2007 : The Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize
2008 : L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science
2009 : Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Trivia
Ada Yonath
- 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.
- 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 from 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.
Biography
Ada Yonath
Last Updated: Friday, October 09, 2009
Yonath was born 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.