Three researchers whose work delves into how information encoded on strands of DNA is translated by the chemical complexes known as ribosomes into the thousands of proteins that make up living matter will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Swedish Academy of Sciences said Wednesday.

The trio are India-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University; and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Each scientist will get a third of the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors in total, or $1.4 million, in a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.

If the sequence of lettered nucleic acids in DNA forms the blueprint for life, ribosomes are the factory floor. In a press release, the Swedish academy said the three, who worked independently, were being honoured “for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level.”

Some antibiotics work by gumming up the ribosomes of bacteria, allowing those bacteria to be stopped at no danger to their host. The ribosome research, the academy said, is being used to develop new antibiotics.

Dr Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu in 1952 and obtained his Ph.D. at Ohio University, and holds American citizenship. Dr Steitz was born in Milwaukee in 1940 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1966.

Dr Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939 and received her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute in 1968. She said on Wednesday that she was both surprised and not surprised at being awarded a Nobel Prize. Speaking by telephone, she said people had long been telling her that her project was a potential winner. But at the same time, she said, there were “many, many people with fantastic work standing in line.”

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