TWAS Prizes In Biology - China And Brazil

This year, the judges awarded two prizes in biology.


Huanming Yang, Beijing Genomics Institute, China, won the Prize in Biology:

for his outstanding achievements and contributions in genomics and bioinformatics research.


Jerson Silva, Instituto de Bioquimica Medica, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, won the Prize in Biology:

for his pioneering work with high pressure in biotechnology and structural biology that has yielded new insights into protein folding, virus assembly and protein misfolding diseases.


China was the only developing country to play a role in the sequencing of the human genome, which was published in 2001. As director of the Beijing Genomics Institute since 1999, Huanming Yang was a key player in this effort. Since then, Yang's group in China has published the complete genome sequence of Indica rice and the silkmoth, and steady progress is being made on the genomes of other commercially important species, including the chicken, pig and soybean.


Yang and his team also made international headlines when they announced that they had sequenced the genome of the SARS virus in just a few days. Information derived from the sequence led to the development of diagnostic kits for the virus that greatly facilitated the control of the disease throughout China.


Currently, Yang and other scientists at the Beijing Institute of Genomics are working on another project linked with the human genome as part of the International HapMap Consortium. The aim is to compare the genomes of three different races of human beings and to identify all the single base substitutions in blocks of DNA (or haplotypes) between them. Scientists believe that these variations are at the root of such ailments as heart disease and asthma, the incidence of which varies between races.


Yang has also promoted science for developing countries in developing countries, and promotes the ethical use of genomic data and open access publishing for all the information generated at the Beijing Institute of Genomics.


Among his various honours, Yang received the Award for Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement from the government of China in 2002, was nominated Research Leader of the Year by Scientific American magazine in 2002, and won the Nikkei Asia Prize for Science, 2003.


Huanming Yang works at the Beijing Genomics Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Airport Industrial Zone B-6, Beijing 101300, China


Proteins are complex macromolecules that perform a wide range of functions in all living organisms. However, they are made of relatively simple subunits, amino acids. Indeed, the diversity of all the proteins in all the living organisms on Earth is based on combinations of just 20 different amino acids. It is how each protein twists and folds its chain of amino acids into a three-dimensional form that gives it its specific characteristics.


Jerson Silva has spent his career analysing how proteins fold into the correct shapes and how they form supramolecular complexes such as virus particles. In 1992, for example, he predicted the potential of high pressure to induce partially folded and molten-globule protein states. A year later, these predictions were confirmed for pressure-denatured proteins. Silva also showed that such partially denatured proteins contained a significant amount of water and predicted a role for water in the action of pressure on proteins.


In addition, using a combination of high pressures and sub-zero temperatures, Silva demonstrated that the interaction between protein molecules and such nucleic acid molecules as DNA depends on the 'entropy' or 'disorder' in the system, and that the nature of such protein-nucleic acid interactions is crucial for the assembly of virus particles that contain little else other than protein and nucleic acid.


More recently, Silva and his colleagues have expanded their work, exploring biophysical approaches to the study of diseases caused by the misfolding of proteins. Such ailments include Parkinson's disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or 'mad cow disease').


Silva was nominated a fellow of the John Simon Guggenhem Foundation in 1991, an international fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1997-2001), and elected to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 1998.


Jerson Silva works at the Centro Nacional de Ressonancia Magnetica Nuclear de Macromoleculas (CNRNM), Instituto de Bioquimica Medica (CCS), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Ilha do Fundao, 21941-590 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


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