STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN: Three scientists, including an Indian-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry for showing how ribosomes function.

The others are American scientist Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath, who would share the prize worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million), the prize committee said on Wednesday.

Their research shows 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.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, is a scientist at the Medical Research Council's prestigious Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, while Thomas Steitz is at Yale University. Ada Yonath works at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.

Understanding ribosomes is an important aspect in the scientific understanding of life. Many of today's antibiotics cure various diseases by blocking the function of ribosomes in bacteria. Without working ribosomes, bacteria cannot survive, according to a Guardian report.