Bulletin Spring‧Summer 2001

An Area of Excellence at CUHK Discipline of the 90s Four decades ago, researchers who wanted to study the causes o f a particula r disease had to first purify the relevant proteins and observe their effects on cellular activity before deducing their relation to the illness and developing treatments or cures. The process is tedious and expensive. I n the 80s, breakthroughs i n genetic engineering allowed researchers to identify D N A base pairs rapidly and to clone large amounts of D N A within a short time span. I n 1992, the US government i n v i t ed participation from other advanced countries in a Huma n Genome Project to identify the sequencing of the entire humane genome and those of simpler life forms before 2005. The t o t al gene sequences i n v o l v e d exceed a hundred thousand. The project's progress has been mu c h faster than planned and it is expected to be completed much sooner. A l t h o u g h the v o l u m e o f g e n e t ic information gathered over the years has been enormous, the majority has been in the f o rm of incomplete fragments. The number of genes whose f u n c t i o n s have been t h o r o u g h l y understood came to around 6,000, not even a tenth of the total number. Discoverin g the functions o f the rest of the genes wou ld be t a n t amo u n t to b r e a k i n g the c omp l e te Encyclopaedia Britannica into infinite pieces and putting them back together. Processing such an enormous volume of d a t a r e q u i r es c o m p u t e r s w i t h h i g h computational power, complex mathematical and statistical formulae ， and knowledge of biogenetics. What results is bioinformatics, a new discipline of the 90s. Hong Kong's First Bioinformatics Centre A pioneer in the field of genomics in Hong K o n g , the Un i v e r s i ty has since the 90s embarked on various genetic research projects. I n f o r m i n g Life and Informe d by Life: B i o i n f o r m a t i c s 29