The Ministry of Science and Technology will provide three million yuan (about 360,000 US dollars) more to support a genome research center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

This was announced by Liu Qian, director of the Biological Engineering Development Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology, at a ceremony held in Beijing on Monday to reward Chinese research staff who participated in the Human Genome Project.

The ministry allocated 30 million yuan last September to help Chinese scientists begin the work of one percent of the international human genome sequencing project.

The Institute of Genetics of the CAS took the major responsibility for the work, while two other Chinese human genome research centers shared some of the work.

Meanwhile, a laboratory specializing in biological information science which is jointly sponsored by the Human Genome Center and the Institute of Computing Technology under the CAS was founded on Monday.

Scientists from the United States, Britain, Japan, France, Germany and China announced on June 26 that they had completed a working draft of the human genome sequence.

As the only developing country which took part in the project, China successfully completed one percent of the human genome sequencing in April.

Through participating in the project, China has built up a whole set of techniques for large-scale genome sequencing and trained a group of researchers in this field, which makes the country the fourth in the world in terms of genome sequencing capacity.

(From People's Daily)