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