Pauli Lectures 2019

Venki Ramakrishnan was born in India, where he received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Baroda University just before moving to the USA in 1971. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Ohio University in 1976, but by then had become interested in biology. So he entered graduate school again, this time in the Biology Department of the University of California, San Diego. In 1978, he began postdoctoral work with Peter Moore at Yale University, where he first began working on ribosomes, the large molecular machines in all cells that read instructions in our genes to make proteins. From 1983-​95 he was a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory before becoming a professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah. Finally, in 1999, he moved to his current position as a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

After working on components of the ribosome for 15 years, Ramakrishnan’s lab began working on the structure of the entire 30S subunit of the ribosome in the mid 1990s. In 2000, his laboratory determined the atomic structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit and its complexes with ligands and antibiotics. This work has led to insights into how the ribosome “reads” the genetic code, as well as into various aspects of antibiotic function. In the last few years, Ramakrishan’s lab has determined the high-​resolution structures of functional complexes of the entire ribosome at various stages along the translational pathway, which has led to insights into its role in protein synthesis during decoding, peptidyl transfer, translocation and termination. More recently his laboratory has been applying cryoelectron microscopy to study eukaryotic and mitochondrial translation. From 1983-​1998, Ramakrishnan’s lab also worked on chromatin structure, determining the structure of the linker histone H1/H5, its location in the 30 nm chromatin filament and the first structure of a histone modifying enzyme, the acetyl-​transferase Hat1. He has also made contributions to methods for phasing crystallographic data using multiwavelength anomalous scattering.

Ramakrishnan is also the author of Gene Machine, a popular book on the quest for the structure of the ribosome.

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