Indian-born scientist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 along with Thomas E Steitz of the US and Ada E Yonath of Israel for their studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Announcing this on Wednesday, the Nobel Committee said in its citation that all three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.<br/><br/>The three Laureates have generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering.<br/><br/>Born in 1952 in Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is now a senior scientist at the MRC Laborartory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge.<br/><br/>AIR correspondent Sarita Brara reports from New Delhi that Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in the temple town of Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, 57-year-old Venketaraman Ramakrishnan did his B.Sc. in Physics in 1971 from Baroda University in Gujarat. Later he migrated to the US to continue his studies and attained American citizenship. Ramakrishnan got his Ph.D in Physics from Ohio University in the US and worked as a graduate student at the University of California from 1976 to 78. During his stint there Ramakrishnan conducted a research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist and later designed his own 2-year transition from physics to biology. As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since. Now a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge Ramakrishnan has authored several important papers in academic journals. After his postdoctoral fellowship, Ramakrishnan joined the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US where he began his collaboration with Stephen White to clone the genes for several ribosomal proteins and determine their three-dimensional structures. Ramakrishnan was also awarded a Guggenheim fellowship during his tenure there, and he used it to make the transition to X-ray crystallography. Ramakrishnan has done one billion plus Indians proud by getting the world's most prestgious prize.<br/>