Mr. Ho Sy Loi (left) and A/P Jagath Rajapakse
(right) holding the best student paper award
and the overall best paper award,
respectively.

The paper written by Mr. Ho Sy Loi and A/P Jagath C. Rajapakse, titled, "Highly sensitive technique for translation initiation site detection" has won both best paper  awards - the Best Student Paper Award and the Overall Best Paper Award, at the First IEEE
Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology held in La Jolla, San Diego, USA, in October, 2004. The wards included plaques and cash awards.

The translation initiation site controls
and regulates the initiation of translation

processes downstream the DNA sequence, which convert the sequence into the
corresponding protein sequence. The failure of the initiation of the translation results in the subsequent steps in synthesizing proteins redundant or impossible. Yet, there is no clear idea what biological factors cause some DNA portions to serve as translation initiation sites; regions that specify the translation initiation are usually poorly conserved with only a few identifiable positions. Pure experimental approaches are not expected to completely solve this problem due to their capital-intensive and time-consuming nature and are also applicable to small sequences. The paper proposed a computational approach, using a hybrid of Markov models and neural networks, to detect translation initiation sites in cDNA, mRNA, or genomic sequences. The approach is capable of incorporating known biological contextual information and complex interactions of features surrounding the translation initiation sites. The technique correctly identified the initiation sites with 93.8% sensitivity and 96.9% specificity on a benchmark dataset, reporting the best performance to date. The new approach could provide an alternative future method to wet-lab experiments of finding translation initiation sites. Mr. Ho Sy Loi, a Ph.D. candidate from the School of Computer Engineering (SCE), has worked under the supervision of A/P Rajapakse (SCE) on computational techniques to detect various signals, such as splice sites, translation initiation sites, and transcription start sites, on genomic sequences. A/P Rajapakse is also the founding and a current Deputy Director of the BioInformatics Research Centre (BIRC) at NTU.