Nutritious Rice For The World [complete], рассчет популяции нового, более питательного риса Налаштування

[Rilian]

Nutritious Rice for the World

проект стартовал 12 мая 2008

Полезные ссылки:

• Интервью с Dr. Ram Samudrala, координатором проекта

Как присоединиться читайте в главном топике World Community Grid

Изучается строение протеинов риса, чтобы потом, не используя генeтические модификации, а просто за счет скрещивания, выводить новые виды. :flowers:

Mission
The objective of this project is to predict the structure of proteins of major strains of rice. The intent is to help farmers breed better rice strains with higher crop yields, promote greater disease and pest resistance, and utilize a full range of bioavailable nutrients that can benefit people around the world, especially in regions where hunger is a critical concern.

Determining the structure of proteins is an extremely difficult and expensive process. However, it is possible to computationally predict a protein's structure from its corresponding DNA sequence. The Computational Biology Research Group at the University of Washington has developed state of the art software to accomplish this. The difficulty is, there are thousands of distinct proteins found in rice. This presents a computational challenge that a single computer cannot solve within a reasonable timeframe. Therefore, volunteers of World Community Grid are invited to assist in this daunting task. Through collaboration with agricultural researchers and farmers, the hope is to eventually improve global rice yields and quality.

Significance
Hunger and malnutrition are the top risks to health worldwide. Nearly 30 percent of the world's population suffers from some form of malnutrition [1]. Every year, 10 million people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases. In fact, more people die from hunger and malnutrition annually than from AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined [2].

Rice is the main food staple of more than half the world's population. 20 percent of the total food energy intake for every man, woman, and child in the world comes from rice. In Asia alone, more than 2 billion people get up to 70 percent of their daily dietary energy from rice and its by-products [3].

Improving strains of rice to yield larger, more resilient, and nutritionally-optimized harvests will positively impact the lives of billions of people.

Approach
Making better strains of rice has traditionally been accomplished through cross breeding of strains to produce hybrids with the best features. However, this is limited to crossing strains with easily observable traits.

Complex traits (such as high yield, disease resistance, or nutrient content) come from complex biochemical interactions of individual component proteins. Identifying such proteins and understanding their properties and interactions gives farmers the opportunity to affect these traits in a refined manner by choosing more subtle candidates for cross breeding. Predicting the structure of proteins can provide insight into the roles they play in the biochemistry of these traits.

Как работает рассчетное ядро
ВЮ содержит некоторые исходные параметры состояния белков. Каждое новое вычисление берет исходные параметры и генерирует новые значения в пределах некоторой нормы, и каждое такое состояние считается примерно 2 минуты на среднем по мощности компьютере. После каждого рассчета ВЮ сохраняется (чекпоинт) и проверяет, превышен ли интервал в 6 часов. Если да - ВЮ отправляется на сервер. Иначе - считается дальше. Таким образом мощные компьютеры могут посчитать примерно 500 состояний за ВЮ, а слабые компьютеры около 200. Соответственно, мощные компьютеры получают больше очков за то же самое время.



График проекта


Це повідомлення відредагував Rilian: May 20 2010, 20:26

[Rilian]

Проект завершен!

All good things must come to an end and this is the case with the Nutritious Rice for the World project as the final results came in earlier this week.

We are analyzing the results and this will take some time. All of the scientists involved in this project are volunteers as well and we will be analyzing the data to identify proteins and genes that may be useful in breeding better rice strains. We are also applying for funding to further develop some of the technologies such as gpu acceleration of the process and sophisticated techniques that recognise structure and sequence patterns or signatures to identify the function of the protein.

There are some tentative plans to perhaps apply the software to other plant genomes.

More details are avaialble at http://protinfo.compbio.washington.edu/rice/status.html

On behalf of the scientific team involved I'd like to thank the IBM team for their support and enthusiasm for the project. Ensuring that the software could run properly on such a diverse set of hardware is quite an amazing feat and IBM deserves recognition for the time and resources that they have devoted.

However, none of this would have been possible without the help of the thousands of volunteers who donated their computers to this project. We consider it a great honour that you have allowed us onto their home machines to run our simulations these past years.

Thank you so much for your efforts.

Hong Hung