Thomas Steitz

Thomas Steitz shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Ada Yonath and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Steitz specifically determined the atomic structure of the large (50S) ribosomal subunit using X-ray crystallography, revealing the mechanism by which the ribosome catalyzes peptide bond formation.

By determining the high-resolution crystal structure of the large ribosomal subunit, Steitz's work showed exactly how many common antibiotics bind to bacterial ribosomes and block protein synthesis. This structural knowledge has been used to design new antibiotics and to understand how resistance mutations alter drug binding sites.

Steitz was a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University, where he conducted his Nobel Prize-winning ribosome crystallography work. He was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and carried out much of his research at Yale's Bass Center for Structural Biology.

Steitz used X-ray crystallography to determine the atomic-resolution structure of the large ribosomal subunit, a massive molecular complex containing both ribosomal RNA and dozens of proteins. Crystallizing such a large and complex assembly was considered an extraordinary technical challenge, and the work built on earlier crystallization breakthroughs by Ada Yonath.