The ribosome is the cellular machine that translates DNA into proteins. Its two subunits, 30S and 50S (which together make up the 70S ribosome), scan over the messenger RNA and spit out polypeptides using amino acids delivered by transfer RNA (tRNA).
The first glimpse of the much anticipated structure came in 2001 when Harry Noller's group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, published the complete bacterial ribosome structure at the modest resolution of 5.5 Å. Several subsequent efforts were published, and then in September 2006, two groups provided high resolution views of the whole ribosome. These two Hot Papers reported the 70S bacterial ribosome structure bound with messenger and transfer RNAs.
"There was no high resolution structure of the whole ribosome with tRNA and mRNA until this work came along," says Venki Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. "So I think it is a ...
