Photo: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology	Credits: Michael Marsland/Yale University	Credits: Micheline Pelletier/Corbis
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan	Thomas A. Steitz	Ada E. Yonath
1/3 of the prize	1/3 of the prize	1/3 of the prize
United Kingdom	USA	Israel
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge, United Kingdom	Yale University New Haven, CT, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute	Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot, Israel
b. 1952 (in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India)	b. 1940	b. 1939

The ribosome is the cellular machinery that translates the message encoded by the genetic code into proteins. We understand the structure of ribosomes because the winners of this year's Nobel Prize used x-ray crystallography to image them. They then used three-dimensional models to describe how antibiotics bind to the ribosome. The models can be used to help develop new antibiotics, based on an understanding of the molecular conformation of the ribosomes in every cell.