A*STAR Career Development Fund (CDF) Recipient – Dr Yao Yinghua
The A*STAR CDF aims to support promising early-career researchers in developing their careers in A*STAR by providing project management experience and seed funding.
 Dr Yao Yinghua Scientist
| Generative AI Framework for Synergistic Design of Protein Sequence, Structure, and Function While AlphaFold has revolutionised protein structure prediction from sequences, Dr Yao’s study takes a step further by combining sequences and structures to design proteins with targeted functions. Current methods generally optimise either sequence or structure independently to improve function. However, protein function is shaped by an interplay between sequence and structural features. To address this, her team is developing a sequence-structure co-design framework that leverages functional guidance from sequence and structure spaces in tandem. This framework ensures that the designed protein maintains its desired 3D structure without compromising the conformations of critical residues, thereby increasing the success rate of functional protein design. The project’s real-world case study will be conducted in collaboration with Dr Chen Xixian, PrincipaI Investigator at A*STAR Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation (A*STAR SIFBI). |