"A lot of biochemical and genetic data had been generated," says Venki Ramakrishnan, group leader, structural studies division, Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, UK. "But it was hard to make sense of that data, and hard to go forward without a structure." A better understanding of ribosomes, the assembly plants for translation, was essential for attaining a clearer picture of the set of biochemical events involved in the process. More specifically, researchers needed to elucidate the interaction of the two subunits, 30S and 50S, that make up the ribosome.
These Hot Papers helped piece together this complex puzzle: The Clemons et al. paper reported the structure of the 30S subunit in the bacterium Thermus thermophilus; the Ban et al. paper detailed the 50S subunit in the bacterium Haloarcula marismortui; and the Cate et al. paper featured a lower resolution structure of the entire ribosome, also in T. thermophilus. ...
