Anam Ahmed
Macaulay Honors College at Queens College
Biochemistry Major
From DNA to Proteins: The Ribosome Riddle
No one around you can hear it but there you sit in lecture waiting for your
professor to give out the graded exams and your body is experiencing a myriad of
mechanisms. Your heart might be beating faster as cardiac muscle made up of actin and
myosin proteins expands and contracts. The heavy breakfast you had has caused your
pancreas to release the protein insulin, which is now working to store the extra glucose
obtained from your breakfast. Maybe you’re so nervous that you’re biting your nails,
slowly disrupting the protein keratin that makes them up.
Out of that lecture hall and into life’s daily routines, we see that our body’s
functions would not be possible without proteins. It was known that these workers of our
bodies were made by ribosomes in our cells but the exact details were unknown. Ada E.
Yonath, Thomas A. Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan were the ones to unravel the
long-standing mysteries of the ribosome. These 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry winners
revealed the positions of the numerous atoms in the ribosome, opening doors not just for
knowledge but a possible solution to the world’s problem of growing antibiotic
resistance. In order to appreciate these three laureates’ contribution to humanity and
science, we begin on a journey through cells and molecules to capture the body’s
essential process of protein synthesis.
The billions of cells in our body would be incomplete without the chemical
deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. The name might be complex but the essence of DNA can
be depicted quite simply. DNA serves
as the recipe for life from its
headquarters in the cell’s nucleus. It
gives our cells the instructions to
create proteins.
A DNA molecule consists of
two strands of nucleotides twisted in a
spiral staircase called a double helix
(figure 1). Each nucleotide consists of
a sugar (deoxyribose) bound to a
phosphate group an