Scientifically speaking, the ribosome's make-up and raison d'etre is elementary: Composed of RNA and proteins, it's the cell site where amino acids get strung together to form new proteins. And, while protein synthesis is a well-studied cellular process, says Nenad Ban, assistant professor, Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, "most ribosomal studies in the past were done 'blindly' since no high-resolution structural information on the ribosome was available."
That was the case until two years ago. This pair of Hot Papers gave scientists a first-time, atomic-resolution view of the large ribosomal subunit and a mechanism to relate its atomic structure to its function.1,2 "Many of the biochemical, genetic, and biophysical experiments that were conducted were important and revealing but sometimes also difficult to interpret and seemingly contradictory," states Ban. No high-resolution structure of the large ribosomal subunit existed prior to these papers.
Ban, along ...
