Tel Aviv - The Israeli joint winner of this year's Nobel Prise for chemistry said Wednesday she was "surprised" to be among the winners.

"I was pretty surprised, because I wasn't expecting it," Professor Ada Yonath said.

She told Israel Radio that her initial reaction, when the Academy called to inform her about 25 minutes before the announcement was made, was one of "happiness."

Yonath, a researcher in the structural biology field, shares the 2009 Nobel chemistry award with US nationals Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A Steitz.

They won the award for their studies of the ribosome, a part of the cell that synthesizes protein and translates genetic code in the production of protein.

Yonath, the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize, is the director of the Centre for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science, south of Tel Aviv. (dpa)