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SoC Assistant Professor Ken Sung Wing Kin has won the
prestigious National Science Award (NSA) for his contribution in
developing an innovative DNA sequencing strategy for studying
the human genome.
Dr Sung, who holds a joint appointment from NUS and the Genome
Institute of Singapore (GIS), won the award along with his GIS
research team-mates Dr Ruan Yijun, Dr Wei Chia Lin and Dr
Patrick Ng.
They received the award from Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister
for Community Development, Youth and Sports and 2nd Minister for
Information, Communications and the Arts, at a ceremony on 11
October 2006.The human genome holds the entire genetic information on the
human race. A full understanding of all its functional elements
and how they interact with each other would allow breakthroughs
in biomedical research.
The functional content within the human genome, however, is
vast and not well-defined. Efficiency in the identification of
functional elements and analysis of their interactions is
therefore critical.
It is in this that the work of the GIS team makes its
contribution. Their technique offers 30-fold increase in
efficiency over conventional sequencing approaches for
transcript annotation, and 100-fold efficiency improvement over
the conventional sequencing methods for Paired End diTags (PET)
experiments.
For their effort, they received a crystal trophy, a citation and
a prize of S$15,000.
NSA is part of The National Science and Technology Awards
presented by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research
(A*Star). It recognises researchers in Singapore who have made
outstanding contributions towards the discovery of new knowledge
or the pioneering development of scientific or engineering
techniques and methods.
Find out more about the work of the GIS team at:
http://www.a-star.edu.sg/astar/about/action/award_NSA_citation.do?id=0e540dae9e6V&awardId=0e29810118lU
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