One year later, in these Hot Papers, Ramakrishnan's group described the complete structure of the 30S subunit at 3 Angstrom resolution, both isolated and complexed with antibiotics. This information answered some long-standing questions on protein synthesis and provided insights into the ways antibiotics can foil the process—knowledge that might someday lead to better drugs.
During the 1990s, Ramakrishnan says a number of discoveries were made that could have helped other researchers arrive at the same conclusions. For one, it had been almost 10 years since Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute showed that crystals of the 50S subunit could be diffracted to high resolution, a feat that broke an important psychological barrier, he says. The second discovery involved synchrotrons, which provide the high energy necessary to diffract such large structures; these were available since 1990. But scientists were using established techniques to clarify the diffraction, with no results. "So it ...
