A scientific research paper on human genes, jointly written by six Chinese scientists has won the Poster Prize from last month's International Human Genome Meeting held recently in Shanghai.

It's the first time that Chinese scientists have won such a prize from the international Human Genome Organization, known as HUGO.

In the thesis entitled In Silico Cloning of Novel Human Genes and Their Experimental Verification, Chinese scientists developed an efficient semi-­automatic in silico cloning process for harvesting novel human genes using super-­computers.

They performed the assembly of Expressed Sequence Tags, or ESTs, from a public EST database and got novel human cDNA sequences. They finally selected 100 candidate novel human genes with typical gene characteristics and certain functional domains. The scientists aim to find new genes as drug targets to aid in the development of new drugs.

(People's Daily May 14, 2002)