Prof. Yonat deciphers structures of ribosomes that belong to disease-causing bacteria, and tries to find out how antibiotics integrate into these structures and interfere with them, and why bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics.
As a child, Ada Yonat dreamed of working on a dairy farm, but fate had other plans for her - Prof. Yonat is now a scientist in the field of structural biology, and is known all over the world thanks to her pioneering work and her groundbreaking discoveries regarding the structure of the ribosome.
The ribosomes are the "protein factories", found in every cell of the body. Interference with the function of the ribosome will cause the death of the cell. Understanding the function of the ribosome is essential, among other things, for the effective design of drugs that will prevent the growth of disease-causing bacteria, but many research efforts in this area have failed. Yonat took on the task - to reveal the XNUMXD structure of the ribosome - a task that was considered impossible at the time. "Everyone laughed at me and said I was dreaming," she says.
At the beginning of the 60s of the 20th century, the concept that the spatial structure of the protein is responsible for its ability to function became more and more established. "The Weizmann Institute of Science was the only place in Israel that had the means to conduct research in this field," says Prof. Yonat, who enrolled in third degree studies in the structural biology department at the institute, under the guidance of Prof. Wolfi Traub. Upon their completion, in 1965, she embarked on post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing there in crystallography - a method for deciphering the spatial structure of proteins based on X-ray scattering data. In 1970 she returned to the Weizmann Institute, and founded a crystallography laboratory there, which was the first of its kind in Israel, and for a decade - the only one in Israel.
"The Weizmann Institute of Science gave me the freedom to do whatever was required for the purpose of the research." Today, her research is driven by the desire to design better drugs. Prof. Yonat deciphers structures of ribosomes that belong to disease-causing bacteria, and tries to find out how antibiotics integrate into these structures and interfere with them, and why bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics.
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Why don't they try to explain in more detail how and what she did and focus on the marginal things of her history?
She deserves a huge woman who behaves very modestly