Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

biology.[21]

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, (born 1952) is an

Indian-born American and British structural biologist.
In 2009 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with
Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath, for studies of the
structure and function of the ribosome".[3][6][7][8][9][10]
As of 2015 he works at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in
Cambridge, UK.[11] On November 30th 2015, Ramakrishnan will take up the post of President of the Royal
Society succeeding his predecessor in the role, Paul
Nurse.[12]

2 Career
Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University.[8] After
his post-doctoral fellowship, he initially could not nd a
faculty position even though he had applied to about 50
universities in the U.S.[17]

He continued to work on ribosomes from 1983-95 as a

sta scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.[2] In
1995 he moved to the University of Utah as a Professor
1 Education and early life
of Biochemistry, and in 1999, he moved to his current
position at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of
Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram in Cuddalore Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he had
district of Tamil Nadu, India[13] to C. V. Ramakrish- also been a sabbatical visitor during 1991-92.
nan and Ramakrishnan Rajalakshmi.[1] Both his parents
were scientists, and his father was head of department In 2005, Ramakrishnans laboratory published a 5.5
of biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Angstrom resolution structure of the 30S subunit. The
Baroda.[1][14][15] At the time of his birth, Ramakrishnans following year, his laboratory determined the complete
father was away from India doing postdoctoral research molecular structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome
with David E. Green at the University of Wisconsin and its complexes with several antibiotics. This was folMadison.[1] His mother obtained a PhD in Psychology lowed by studies that provided structural insights into the
from McGill University in 1959[16] which she completed mechanism that ensures the delity of protein biosynthein only 18 months, and was mentored by Donald O. sis. More recently in 2007 his laboratory has determined
Hebb.[1] Ramakrishnan moved to Vadodara (previously the atomic structure of the whole ribosome in complex
also known as Baroda) in Gujarat at the age of three, with its tRNA and mRNA ligands. Ramakrishnan is also
where he had his schooling at Convent of Jesus and Mary, known for his past work on histone and chromatin strucexcept for spending 196061 in Adelaide, Australia. Fol- ture.
lowing his Pre-Science at the Maharaja Sayajirao Uni- As of 2015 his most cited papers (according to
versity of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the Scopus[22] ) have been published in Nature,[23][24][25]
same university on a National Science Talent Scholarship, Science,[26][27] and Cell.[28][29][30]
graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics
in 1971.[8] At the time, the physics course at Baroda was
new, and based in part on the The Feynman Lectures on
3 Awards and honours
Physics.[1]
In a lecture in January 2010 at the Indian Institute of Science, he revealed that he failed to get admitted to any of
the Indian Institutes of Technology or the Christian Medical College, Vellore, Tamil Nadu.[17]

Ramakrishnan was elected a Member of the European

Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2002[31] and
a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2003. He was
elected a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004. In 2007, Ramakrishnan was awarded the
Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine and the Datta Lectureship and Medal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS). In 2008, he won the Heatley Medal
of the British Biochemical Society. Since 2008, he is a
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and a foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. In 2009,
Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Immediately after graduation he moved to the U.S.A.,

where he obtained his PhD degree in Physics from Ohio
University in 1976 for research into the ferroelectric
phase transition of Potassium Dihydrogen Phosphate
(KDP)[18] supervised by Tomoyasu Tanaka.[4][19][20] He
then spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego
while making a transition from theoretical physics to
1

REFERENCES

along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath.[32] He received Indias second highest civilian honor, the Padma
Vibhushan, in 2010.[33] Ramakrishnan was knighted in
the 2012 New Year Honours for services to Molecular
Biology,[34] but does not generally use the title 'Sir'. In
the same year, he was awarded the Sir Hans Krebs Medal
by the FEBS. In 2013, he won the Spanish Jimnez-Diz
Prize. Ramakrishnan was included as one of 25 Greatest
Global Living Indians by NDTV Channel, India on 14
December 2013. His certicate of election to the Royal
Society reads:

[10] Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Audio Interview Ocial

Nobel Foundation website telephone interview

[14] http://www.asianwindow.com/tag/
venkatraman-venki-ramakrishnan/

Personal life

[11] Nair, Prashant (2011). Prole of Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
108 (38): 1567615678. doi:10.1073/pnas.1113044108.
PMC 3179092. PMID 21914843.
[12] Peplow, M. (2015).
Structural biologist named
president of UK Royal Society.
Nature.
doi:10.1038/nature.2015.17153.
[13] Common root: Tamil Nadu gets its third laureate.
Times of India. TNN. 8 October 2009.

Ramakrishnan married Vera Rosenberry in 1975,[1] an [15] Ramakrishnan, C. V.; Banerjee, B. N. (1951). Mould
Lipase: Eect of Addition of Vitamins and Sterol to
author and illustrator of childrens books. His stepdaughthe Cake Medium on the Growth and the Activity of
ter Tanya Kapka is a doctor in Oregon, and his son Raman
the Lipolytic Mould. Nature 168 (4282): 917918.
Ramakrishnan is a cellist based in New York.[35]
doi:10.1038/168917a0.

References

[1] Venkatraman Ramakrishnan - Biography: From Chidambaram to Cambridge: A Life in Science. Stockholm:
nobelprize.org. Archived from the original on 2015-0418.
[2] Cerf, Corinne; Lippens, Guy; Muyldermans, Serge;
Segers, Alain; Ramakrishnan, V.; Wodak, Shoshana
J.; Hallenga, Klaas; Wyns, Lode (1993). Homoand heteronuclear two-dimensional NMR. Biochemistry
(American Chemical Society) 32 (42): 1134511351.
doi:10.1021/bi00093a011. Retrieved 2015-06-17.
[3] RAMAKRISHNAN, Sir Venkatraman. Whos Who 2015
(online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an
imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
[4] Ramakrishnan, Venkatraman; Tanaka, Tomoyasu (1977).
Greens-function theory of the ferroelectric phase transition in potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP)". Physical
Review B (American Physical Society) 16 (1): 422426.
doi:10.1103/physrevb.16.422. Retrieved 2015-06-17.
[5] Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: Certicate of Election
EC/2003/31. London: The Royal Society. 2003.
Archived from the original on 2015-06-18.
[6] 2009 Chemistry Nobel Laureates. Nobel Foundation.
2009. Retrieved 2009-10-14.
[7] Rodnina, Marina V.;
Wintermeyer, Wolfgang
(2010).
The ribosome goes Nobel.
Trends in
Biochemical Sciences (Elsevier BV) 35 (1): 15.
doi:10.1016/j.tibs.2009.11.003. Retrieved 2015-06-17.
[8] Venkatraman_Ramakrishnan.
University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on 2015-04-19.
[9] Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Oce
of Scientic and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy

[16] Ramakrishnan, Rajalakshmi (1959). Comparative Eects

of Successive and Simultaneous Presentation on Transfer
in Verbal Learning (PhD thesis). McGill University.
[17] Nobel laureate Venkat Ramakrishnan failed IIT, medical
entrance tests. The Times Of India. 2010-01-05.
[18] Ramakrishnan, Venkatraman (1976). The Green function
theory of the ferroelectric phase transition in KDP (PhD
thesis). Ohio University. OCLC 3079828.
[19] Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: A prole. Times of India.
2009-10-07. Retrieved 2009-10-07.
[20] FACTBOX: Nobel chemistry prize Who are the winners?". Reuters. 2009-10-07. Retrieved 2009-10-07.
[21] Prole: Dr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. Indian Express. 7 October 2009. Retrieved 2009-10-07.
[22] Venkatraman Ramakrishnans publications indexed by the
Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by
Elsevier.
[23] Ramakrishnan, V.; Wimberly, Brian T.; Brodersen, Ditlev
E.; Clemons, William M.; Morgan-Warren, Robert J.;
Carter, Andrew P.; Vonrhein, Clemens; Hartsch, Thomas
(2000). Structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit. Nature
407 (6802): 327339. doi:10.1038/35030006. PMID
11014182.
[24] Ramakrishnan, V.; Carter, Andrew P.; Clemons, William
M.; Brodersen, Ditlev E.; Morgan-Warren, Robert J.;
Wimberly, Brian T. (2000). Functional insights from
the structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit and its interactions with antibiotics. Nature 407 (6802): 340348.
doi:10.1038/35030019. PMID 11014183.
[25] Ramakrishnan, V.; Finch, J. T.; Graziano, V.; Lee,
P. L.; Sweet, R. M. (1993). Crystal structure of
globular domain of histone H5 and its implications for
nucleosome binding. Nature 362 (6417): 219223.
doi:10.1038/362219a0. PMID 8384699.

[26] Ogle, J. M.; Brodersen, DE; Clemons, WM Jr; Tarry,

MJ; Carter, AP; Ramakrishnan, V (2001). Recognition of Cognate Transfer RNA by the 30S Ribosomal
Subunit. Science (New York) 292 (5518): 897902.
doi:10.1126/science.1060612. PMID 11340196.
[27] PMID 16959973 (PubMed)
Citation will be completed automatically in a few minutes.
Jump the queue or expand by hand
[28] Brodersen, Ditlev E.; Clemons, William M.; Carter, Andrew P.; Morgan-Warren, Robert J.; Wimberly, Brian T.;
Ramakrishnan, V. (2000). The Structural Basis for the
Action of the Antibiotics Tetracycline, Pactamycin, and
Hygromycin B on the 30S Ribosomal Subunit. Cell 103
(7): 11431154. doi:10.1016/s0092-8674(00)00216-6.
PMID 11163189.
[29] Ramakrishnan, V. (2002). Ribosome Structure and the
Mechanism of Translation. Cell 108 (4): 557572.
doi:10.1016/s0092-8674(02)00619-0. PMID 11909526.
[30] Ogle, James M.; Murphy, Frank V.; Tarry, Michael J.;
Ramakrishnan, V. (2002). Selection of tRNA by the Ribosome Requires a Transition from an Open to a Closed
Form. Cell 111 (5): 721732. doi:10.1016/s00928674(02)01086-3. PMID 12464183.
[31] The EMBO Pocket Directory (PDF). European Molecular Biology Organization. Archived from the original on
2015-03-16.
[32] All Nobel Laureates in Chemistry. Nobel Foundation.
Retrieved 2009-10-07.
[33] This Years Padma Awards announced (Press release).
Ministry of Home Aairs. 25 January 2010. Retrieved
25 January 2010.
[34] The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 60009. p. 1. 31
December 2011.
[35] Amit Roy (17 Oct 2009). "Venki makes light of India
link Winner says not to treat science like cricket; league
of misses grows. The Telegraph (Kolkata). Retrieved
2009-10-17.

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