Nobel laureate to address biology department colloquium Oct. 20

One of the winners of this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Dr. Venkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan, will speak at the Department of Biology's weekly colloquium on Tuesday, Oct. 20. Ramakrishnan, of the Structural Studies Division of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, will deliver the John M. Buchanan lecture on "how the ribosome facilitates selection of the right tRNA during decoding of the message." The lecture will be at 4 p.m. in Stata 32-123. Ramakrishnan was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome, the life-giving structure within cells that translates information encoded on DNA and turns it into various proteins. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.