What kind of chemistry experiments highlight Mole Day in Boise?
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that Thomas A. Steitz, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Yale University, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science, are the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. According to the Royal Swedish Academy, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the three scientists for research that shows what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called x-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.
