Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to U.S., Israeli scientists

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday it has awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to one Israeli and two U.S. scientists "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."

STOCKHOLM, October 7 (RIA Novosti) - The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday it has awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to one Israeli and two U.S. scientists "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."

The 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) award will be shared this year by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan from MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, Thomas A. Steitz from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and Ada Yonath from Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life's core processes: the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life... As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics," the Nobel Committee for Chemistry said in a statement.

The prize, established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in his will in 1895, also covers chemistry, medicine, literature, peace and economics.

This year's medicine prize rewarded research of telomeres that protect chromosomes, while the prize in physics was awarded for the development of fiber optic cables and digital photography technology.

The literature and peace prize winners will be announced later this week and the economics announcement is set for Monday.