Nutritious Rice for the World
| Nutritious Rice for the World | |
|---|---|
| Area: | Agronomy |
| Target: | Improvement of the rice yield through targeted breeding of higher-yielding and more resistant rice strains |
| Operator: | University of Washington , Infrastructure sponsored by IBM |
| Country: | United States |
| Platform: | BOINC |
| Website: | http://protinfo.compbio.washington.edu/rice/ |
| Project status | |
| Status: | completed |
| Start: | 05/12/2008 |
| The End: | 04/09/2010 |
Nutritious Rice for the World was a World Community Grid project for distributed computing . The aim of the project was to improve the rice yield by breeding more high-yielding and more resistant rice strains.
The project tried to predict the protein structures of the main rice strains. Determining the structure of proteins is an extremely computationally intensive process. The Computational Biology Research Group of the University of Washington has developed state of the art software to cope with this challenge. However, there are thousands of different proteins that have been found in rice, so a lot of computing time had to be invested in predicting the protein structures.
In order to participate, after registering on the World Community Grid website, a small program (the so-called “Grid Client”) had to be installed, which is available for Windows , Linux and Mac as part of the BOINC software. This program then obtained a task package from the website.
The results of the calculations will be made available to research in the public domain.