Contact:

Peter Unrau, 778.782.3448; punrau@sfu.ca
Anoop Sarkar, 778.782.2015; anoop@sfu.ca
Marianne Meadahl, PAMR, 778.782.9017; Marianne_Meadahl@sfu.ca

Two Simon Fraser University scientists are the recipients of new awards that will enable one to further explore the origins of life while the other taps into how machines can better translate natural language.

Peter Unrau, a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, and computing scientist Anoop Sarkar are recipients of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS) awards. Valued at $120,000 over three years, the awards are part of a $413 million national research funding announcement supporting thousands of researchers across the country.

The DAS awards are significant because they support research that, according to NSERC, explores “high risk, novel or potentially transformative concepts and lines of inquiry.”

"Selected by their peers, these awards acknowledge the originality and significance of Drs. Unrau and Sarkar's research programs," says Vice-President, Research Mario Pinto. "With NSERC's support, they can now take this innovative research to the next level and realize its full impact."

Unrau’s interest lies in how the world began some 3.7 billion years ago. His lab has already made significant contributions towards the theory that RNA played a substantive role in the early evolution of life – what is known as the RNA World hypothesis – by determining that RNA maintained metabolic reactions prior to the evolution of protein catalysts. 

The researchers have found RNA enzymes that are at least partially able to copy other RNA templates, something that may be essential to unraveling how life might have originated in an RNA world. Researchers will extend the research and continue their work related to RNA replication.

RNA stands for RiboNucleic Acid and is similar to DNA, the long double-stranded molecule that holds the genetic code for all life. RNA can also carry codes for living things and is built of virtually the same molecular "alphabet" as DNA.

“One of my lab’s long term objectives is to select and evolve an RNA replicase ribozyme capable of sustaining RNA based evolution in the laboratory,” says Unrau, noting that such a system could be considered “alive,” marrying the underlying simplicity of chemistry to the complexity of biology. “Identifying the minimal complexity required to produce an RNA replicace would inform us as never before about the difficulties faced on the early Earth in transitioning from an abiotic to biotic world,” he says.

Meanwhile Sarkar’s research is all about widening the scope of translation. Building on the substantial advances in the field of machine translation over the past two decades, with former rule-based approaches being replaced by statistical machine translation, Sarkar says today’s translation systems – offered by the likes of Google and SDL ­– rely on big data between specific language pairs, such as French and English, and ignore many other languages spoken by millions.

Sarkar’s goal is to use linguistic insights about language families to develop multilingual statistical machine translation models and algorithms. “Our project aims to transfer information from language pairs with a lot of resources, such as French-English, to low-resource language pairs, such as English-Inuktitut,” Sarkar describes.

“We hope to address a basic and unresolved issue in statistical machine translation research – learning a translation model between any pair of

languages, regardless of resource limitations.”

Simon Fraser University is Canada's top-ranked comprehensive university and one of the top 50 universities in the world under 50 years old. With campuses in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, B.C., SFU engages actively with the community in its research and teaching, delivers almost 150 programs to more than 30,000 students, and has more than 120,000 alumni in 130 countries.

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