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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz of the United States and Israel's Ada Yonath have won the Nobel chemistry prize for their studies on the ribosome, one of the cell's most complex machineries, at the atomic level.

Two Americans and an Israeli shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry for showing how ribosomes function, work that has important implications for antibiotics, the prize committee said on Wednesday.

The prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) recognised Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath for showing how the ribosome, which produces protein, functions at the atomic level.

"As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics," the Nobel Committee for Chemistry
at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

This was the third of this year's Nobel prizes, following awards for medicine or physiology on Monday and for physics on
Tuesday.