Sun receives NSF CAREER Award

Yanni Sun, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has received an NSF CAREER award for the project "New Technologies for Genome-Scale Comparative NcRNA Identification". This project proposes new algorithms and technologies for noncoding RNA annotation in large-scale sequence databases. Annotating ncRNAs in different organisms is highly important to modern biology. Among numerous efforts made for ncRNA detection, few approaches can be practically applied to whole genomes or large-scale databases. This project will develop novel ncRNA detection algorithms that can achieve high efficiency and sensitivity by integrating structural features of ncRNAs with conventional comparative sequence analysis. The developed tools will impact numerous genome-scale annotation projects.

The research goals of this project will be closely integrated with the interdisciplinary training of computational biology at MSU. Education plans will be conducted to improve the awareness of computational biology as an important research area among students in biology and engineering.

(Date Posted: 2010-06-11)