Nobel prize 2009 in chemistry

Two Americans and one Israeli share this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work showing how the DNA code is translated into life itself.

Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath from Israel were all instrumental in showing how proteins are made at the atomic level.

The three laureates have accomplished what many scientists thought impossible, namely to determine the three-dimensional structure of the molecular machine that makes all the proteins in a cell, the so-called ribosome.While DNA molecules contain the blueprint for life inside each cell of every organism, it is the ribosome that translates that information into life.

Using x-ray crystallography to obtain snapshots of the ribosome in action, they have been able to explain how the ribosome selects and couples together amino acids to form proteins.

The three recipients share the $1.4 million prize. The chemistry award is the third in the 2009 Nobel series. Prizes for medicine were handed out Monday and for physics on Tuesday.

(Prizes for the sciences and for peace have been handed out annually since 1901. )