Nutritious Rice for the World facts for kids
| Developer(s) | Samudrala Computational Biology Group, University of Washington |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 2008-5-12 |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Type | Distributed computing |
Nutritious Rice for the World is a special science project. It's part of the World Community Grid, which uses many computers to solve big problems. This project started on May 12, 2008.
Scientists at the University of Washington lead this project. Their main goal is to understand the tiny parts of rice called proteins. By learning about these proteins, they hope to help farmers grow better rice.
This improved rice could produce more food from each plant. It could also fight off diseases and pests more easily. Most importantly, it could have more nutrients that our bodies can use. This is super important for people around the world, especially where malnutrition (not getting enough good food) is a big problem.
Contents
Why Rice Matters
Rice is a very important food for billions of people. It's a main part of meals in many countries. Making rice better can help feed more people and keep them healthy.
Scientists want to find ways to make rice stronger and more nutritious. This means it can grow well even in tough conditions. It also means it can give people the vitamins and energy they need.
Understanding Rice Proteins
Every living thing, including rice, is made of tiny building blocks called proteins. These proteins do all the work inside a plant. They help it grow, fight off sickness, and even store nutrients.
To understand how rice works, scientists need to know the exact shape, or structure, of its proteins. Imagine trying to understand a complex machine without seeing its parts. Knowing the protein structure is like having a blueprint for the rice plant.
Figuring out a protein's structure is very hard and expensive. It's like solving a giant puzzle. Even with powerful computers, it takes a lot of time. Rice has thousands of different proteins, making this a huge challenge.
How Computers Help
Scientists can use computers to predict a protein's shape from its DNA sequence. This is like reading a secret code that tells the computer how to build the protein.
The University of Washington group created special software called Protinfo. This software can predict protein structures much faster and cheaper. It helps them create 3D models of rice proteins.
These 3D models help scientists guess what each protein does. They can then understand the role of the gene that makes that protein. All these models and findings are stored in a special online database called Bioverse.
The Power of World Community Grid
The World Community Grid uses the power of many computers working together. Volunteers around the world let their computers help with science projects when they're not using them.
For the Nutritious Rice project, these volunteer computers run the Protinfo software. They create thousands of models for each rice protein. This helps scientists pick the very best models.
By using so many computers, the project can do a huge amount of work quickly. What would take one supercomputer many years can be done in just a couple of years with the World Community Grid.
Project Progress
The project aims to study the structures of 30,000 to 60,000 rice proteins. Using the World Community Grid, scientists could create one billion models in about two years. This would have taken about 30 years with their own computers!
The main work of using volunteer computers paused in April 2010. Scientists are now carefully studying all the results they collected. They hope to get more funding to continue this important research in the future.
What We Hope to Learn
The knowledge gained from this project is very valuable. It could lead to new types of rice plants. These new hybrids could grow more food, resist diseases and pests better, and have more nutrients.
This research doesn't just help rice. The lessons learned can also be used for other important food crops. This includes plants like wheat and maize (corn). Ultimately, this project helps make sure more people have enough healthy food to eat.
Computer Requirements
If you wanted to help with this project (or similar ones on World Community Grid), your computer would need to meet some basic requirements:
- At least 128 MB of RAM (computer memory).
- 200 MB of Hard Disk Drive space, with at least 50 MB free.
- A screen that can show 8-bit graphics at 640x480 resolution.
- An Internet connection with at least 28 kbit/s speed.
- An operating system like Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Linux, or Mac OS X.
- An Intel or PowerPC processor.
