Nobel winner Venki’s work as important as penicillin discovery: UK minister

LONDON - The scientific breakthrough provided by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the Indian-born scientist who has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, could become as significant as the discovery of penicillin, Britains science minister has said.

Venki’s work on the ribosome… could prove as relevant to human health as the discovery of penicillin itself, Lord Paul Drayson said after Ramakrishnan was Wednesday named alongside Thomas Steitz of America and Ada Yonath of Israel for the coveted prize.

By relentlessly exploring the arrangements of atoms in the ribosome, Venki and his team have been helping in the design of antibiotics and laying the foundation of synthetic biology, Drayson said.

The British ministers high praise came amid hopes that the work by Ramakrishnan and others on ribosomes - minute particles found in living cells - could lead to the development of drugs to fight infectious diseases, including drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis (TB).

“Fifty percent of all antibiotics target the ribosome, and now we have the tools to begin looking at if there are other substances we can fit into different slots to block and disturb bacteria in our bodies,” said Peter Brezinski, a member of the Swedens Royal Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel winners in the sciences.

Ramakrishnan, working at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britains Cambridge University, demonstrated what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at an atomic level.

The three Nobel winners used a visualisation method called X-ray crystallography to map the position of each of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Ramakrishnans basic research on the arrangement of atoms in the ribosome allowed his team not only to gain detailed knowledge of how it contributes to protein production but also to see directly how antibiotics bind to specific pockets in the ribosome structure.

This could help researchers to design antibiotics to treat people who are infected with a bacterium that has developed antibiotic resistance, for example some of the strains of bacteria that cause tuberculosis, the MRC said.

TB kills nearly 1.8 million people around the world every year - in India alone, it claims 940 lives every single day.

According to the World Health Organization, TB is spreading at the rate of one new infection every second. In 2007, there were 9.27 million new cases - 500,000 of them resistant to drugs and 50,000 extensively drug resistant.

Better targeting of the bacterial ribosome should also help reduce the side-effects of taking antibiotics, said the MRC.

MRC Chief Executive Sir Leszek Borysiewicz said: It is only on the back of such discoveries that we can continue to drive translation into benefits for human health.”

Ramakrishnan added: The ribosome is already starting to show its medical importance.