From left to right: Piero Carninci, Stylianos E. Antonarakis (HUGO President) and Edison Liu (Chen Award 2014 Recipient). photo courtesy of HUGO
On April 30, RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies Deputy Director Piero Carninci was presented the Chen Award of Excellence 2014 at the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) Human Genome Meeting 2014 in Geneva, Switzerland.
He was given this prestigious award for developing technologies to quantitatively analyze the transcribed part of the genome (transcriptome), such as cap-trapper and CAGE, allowing the identification of non-coding RNAs as the major output of the mammalian genome and making possible comprehensive maps of mammalian transcription start sites. He was praised for making a large contribution to the success of prestigious international consortia such as FANTOM and ENCODE by applying these technologies. Additionally he was cited for successfully applying CAGE to tiny amounts of RNAs, in order to approach biological problems for which there is only a limited amount of starting material. These solutions to technical challenges, together with the broad application of these technologies to the solution of fundamental biological problems, were highly evaluated.
The Chen Award was set up by Professor Yuan-Tsong Chen and Mrs. Alice Der-Shan Chen, who are both originally from Taiwan and have been committed to biomedical research for over 30 years. The award presentation ceremony and a lecture are held in conjunction with the annual Human Genome Organization (HUGO) Human Genome Meeting.