On Oct. 7, 2009, the Nobel Foundation announced that Ada E. Yonath had won a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.

In the 1970s, Ada Yonath began a project that culminated in 2000 in her successful mapping (together with other researchers) of the structure of ribosomes, which consist of hundreds of thousands of atoms, using x-ray crystallography. Among other applications, this has been important in the production of antibiotics.