Welcome to the Nutritious Rice for the World project!
Rice is one of primary staple foods of the world. We are using our structure prediction algorithms available at Protinfo to predict the high resolution structures of proteins expressed in major rice strains. We will then use these structures to predict function, and interaction with other molecules including proteins, DNA, RNA, and nutrients (ions, small molecules, etc.) using tools also available at the Protinfo site. The eventual goal is to help farmers use marker assisted breeding to produce better rice strains with higher crop yields, greater disease and pest resistance, and that will provide a full range of bioavailable nutrients thereby benefiting those in regions where hunger and nutrient deficiency is a critical concern. To accomplish this we need to understand the behavior of rice proteins, and this in turn is aided by understanding their molecular structure. Our software can predict the structure, but the computational challenge to solve this problem is great and would require decades of computing time on our best computer cluster. We expect that it can be done in about a year using World Community Grid. We are excited to bring this challenge to World Community Grid, and welcome your participation!
In addition to the information on the World Community Grid pages, you may follow along with our progress on this site.
New: We have created a straight-forward web interface to download the top scoring models of any rice protein we modelled, along with a tar and bzipped archive of the models for all the protein sequences.
This project is made possible with the generous donation of computing time from World Community Grid volunteers, support from IBM, and software from the BOINC project.
Funding for research comes from National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
Rice photos are courtesy of International Rice Research Institute.