A new, sharper picture of the nano-machine that translates our genetic program into proteins promises to help researchers explain how some types of antibiotics work and could lead to the design of better ones.The high-resolution snapshots of the bacterial ribosome were captured by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) with the lab’s Advanced Light Source, which generates intense beams of X-rays that can reveal unprecedented structural detail of such large and complex molecules.The new, high-resolution data on the intact ribosome allows researchers to build more detailed and more realistic models of the ribosome that until now were impossible with the “fuzzy pictures” available.While sharp images of the two main pieces of the ribosome have already provided great insight into how specific antibiotics work, many antibiotics, such as the aminoglycosides, only interfere with the entire, fully assembled molecular machine.
