Proteins and Prizes

Wellcome Image Award winner and current Wellcome Trust grant holder, Venkatraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan, has been named as one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009.

Venki's computer-generated molecular model of a ribosome, showing its 3D structure in great detail, impressed the judges of the Wellcome Image Awards in 2008. It is for his research on the structure and function of the ribosome, which converts DNA information into proteins, that the Nobel Prize has been awarded.

Specifically, it is Venki's use of X-ray crystallography to map the atomic structure that has been recognised. This technique has advanced from the standard X-ray, early examples of which are held in the Library's collections.

Venki's Wellcome Award-winning image, the accompanying protein-synthesis animation and a recording of Venki describing his image, background and research are available online.

Author: Louise Crane

Puzzling proteins

Put your visualisation skills to work for scientific research at Foldit, a computer game pitting humans against computers in the race to understand the function of proteins.

Why humans, when computers are so much faster? According to the people at Foldit: "We’re collecting data to find out if humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!"

You can search our contemporary research images for some eye-catching folds like the one below. Wellcome Images also has a gallery of research images from the recent Wellcome Image Awards available to view online.