Ada Yonath at ITQB: save the date

Oeiras, 02.07.2014

The first Frontier Leaders seminar after the summer holidays is a very special one. To mark the International Year of Crystallography, Ada Yonath, Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2009, will be speaking at ITQB on the very important topic of antibiotic resistance. The seminar is scheduled for September 9.

When others thought it impossible, Ada Yonath concentrated on obtaining the structure from the ribosome, a complex cellular machine that creates proteins from RNA. For her persistence, which opened the field to others, she received in 2009 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz “for studies on the structure and function of the ribosome”.

Today, Ada Yonath is still an active protein crystallography researcher at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. In her research, Ada Yonath attempts to determine the structural bases for processes involved in protein biosynthesis and their inhibition by antibiotics or similar compounds, including elucidation of mechanisms used for acquiring resistance, and the properties utilized for the discrimination between pathogens and eukaryotes, namely those allowing for clinical usefulness.

This is the second time Ada Yonath visits ITQB.

The year 2014 has been proclaimed the International Year of Crystallography by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to commemorates not only the centennial of X-ray diffraction, which allowed the detailed study of crystalline material, but also the 400th anniversary of Kepler’s observation in 1611 of the symmetrical form of ice crystals, which began the wider study of the role of symmetry in matter.