The royal Swedish academy of sciences said Venkatraman ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath's work on ribosomes
has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life.
Yonath, 70 years old is the fourth woman to win the chemistry Nobel prize and the first since 1964.
ribosomes are crucial to life because the produce proteins that control the chemistry of plants and human beings. Workin separately, the laureates used a method called X-ray crustallography to pinpoint the positions of the hundreds of atoms that make up the ribosomes.
the work was published in 200. while many Nobel winners are honored for their joint work, this year's chemistry winner were competing with each other.
their work builds on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and more directly on the work done by James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who won the 1962 Nobel prize in medicine for mapping DNA's double helix, the citation said.
Ramakrishan described his work on ribosomes as an attempt to understand 'this large molecular machine that takes information from genes and uses it to stitch together protein'.
Steitz a 69year old born in Milwaukee, is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale university and attached to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, both in New haven Connecticut.
He told AP that th work was done in parallel but independetly and that he has known ramakrishnan since the 1980s, he has met Yonath befor too. he also noted that they were all taking separate approaches.
Yonath is a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of science in Rehovot, Israel and the ninth Israeli to win a Nobel prize. she told radio Israeli that she doesn't think that gender played a role in her win.
Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, established the Nobel Prizes in his will 1895. the first awards were awarded six years later.
each prize comes with a 10million kronor($1.4million) purse, a diploma, a gold medal and an invitation to the ceremony in Stockholm on December 10th. The prize is handed out in Oslo.