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SUMMARY:HONORARY FELLOWS LECTURE - Seeing is believing: how a Century afte
 r its discovery\, Bragg's Law allows us to peer into molecules that read t
 he information in our genes - Dr Venki Ramakrishnan FRS\,  MRC Laboratory 
 of Molecular Biology
DTSTART:20121107T180000Z
DTEND:20121107T190000Z
UID:TALK31921@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Beverley Larner
DESCRIPTION:\nExactly a hundred years ago\, the Philosophical Society publ
 ished a paper by Lawrence Bragg describing his law on the diffraction of x
 -rays by crystals. That work set in motion a remarkable cascade of events 
 in chemistry. In the previous hundred years\, chemists\, by sheer imaginat
 ion and ingenuity had not only discovered the existence of molecules but h
 ad very concrete ideas about their structure. But Bragg's law made it poss
 ible to directly determine  the structures of molecules from x-ray diffrac
 tion measurements\, so for the first time\, molecules could be "seen." Thi
 s led initially to the three-dimensional structures of simple molecules li
 ke common salt\, to increasingly more complex ones like vitamins and antib
 iotics. Another  major advance in the method was made by Max Perutz\, hims
 elf a protegé of Bragg\, which allowed the determination of the structure
 s of molecules such as proteins with thousands of atoms.\n\nIn this talk\,
  I shall allude briefly to the history of the field\, and then describe ho
 w the method in its current state was used to solve the structure of the r
 ibosome\, the large molecular machine that consists of half a million atom
 s and is present in all forms of life. The ribosome reads the sequence of 
 information in our genes to synthesize the proteins encoded by them. The a
 tomic structure of the ribosome has yielded insights into its function and
  its ancient origins from a world that existed before proteins or DNA. Fin
 ally\, because ribosomes are so ancient\, they have diverged significantly
  between humans and bacteria. As a result\, a large number of useful antib
 iotics work by blocking the bacterial ribosome without affecting the human
  version. The atomic structures allow us to see how these antibiotics inhi
 bit the ribosome\, and pave the way for the design of new antibiotics that
  can overcome resistant strains.
LOCATION:Lady Mitchell Hall\, Sidgwick Avenue\, Cambridge
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