Please let me clarify for you. In computational biology (bioinformatics), we use what is know for in one species to understand that which is not known for another. This is the transfer we speak of.

This transfer is virtual, done with sequences in a computer. Experiments designed using the output data from you wonderful crunchers will not take one gene from one species and put it in another. We will not take a gene from a one strain of rice and put it in another. We will breed strains of rice together. Like dog breeders. Like farmers have been doing since farming was invented.

Actually the transferability of information from one species to another is a foundation of biology research. Biologists use this concept through homologous genes, those genes / proteins in different species with the highest DNA / amino acid sequence similarity. Sadly, this is one of the reasons people do so much work on mice and other mammals, and lets not forget the poor yeast & bacteria too :-<. Nonetheless, what is true for mouse is often true for humans.

We use knowledge based statistical models to apply all that science has created over the last 100+ years, from all species to rice, to speed up the experimental processes & avoid wasteful tooling around (i.e. create the best predictions possible before going to the lab).

We have a huge focus on rice (as shown by this WCG project), but we also apply all our methods computationally to all species <http://bioverse.compbio.washington.edu>. Well, we cannot hope to model all of the protein structures for species in our other projects in the near future, this takes your massive computing power [thank you IBM]. But we do simulations to speed up research for all species, and these simulations have helped tremendously to avoid wastefulness in animals cost, time, etc. done by our collaborating experimentalists (<http://compbio.washington.edu/ongoing_research.html>): malaria, HIV, herpes, various infective bacteria (E coli, Mycoplama, Nitrosomonas), human, tooth regeneration,




The results from this project are not made for the purpose of genetic engineering. We do not do genetic engineering, our collaborators do not do genetic engineering. <http://compbio.washington.edu/papers/samudrala_2005a.pdf>

I'm not certain what you mean by "available like a waste-product for further use (patents)." There will be no patents, this is all public domain. We seek to minimize waste as described above, and have made tremendous impact in this domain <http://compbio.washington.edu/papers/samudrala_2008a.pdf>



Nope.



We deeply appreciate your conscience. This is what drives us as well. We understand your concerns. If we didn't come along to do it right, it is possible that someone could try genetic engineering for rice. Its a great thing IBM came to help us do this & do it right!

Since we have such a fantastic team working with us on this project <http://compbio.washington.edu/papers/samudrala_2005a.pdf>, with almost 10 continuous years of productive funding, WCG on our side, we are confident that no genetic engineering approach will do better. Rice is an incredibly complex system with more genes than humans; science has not yet figured out how to genetically engineer without messing them up, so using the tools of simple cross breading that ole' mother nature put in our hands will win out.



:->
Thanks for participating and helping us to clarify these concerns for the others who might be concerned!!! Keep up the crunching!

Peace and thanks,
jeremy

A one stop shop AND these projects would hardly have happened if WCG had not invested millions into the hosting, free to the humanitarian project owners. NRW is time limited, 1 year approximately whilst several of the other projects are long running, often subdivided in many experiments like HPF2 and FA@H.



(White text labels are projects in progress, black are complete or inactive)

Thousands more have joined the World Community Grid force to work on common, yet so direly in need of solution needing problems:

Nutritious Rice f/t World has done great so far, getting about a 1/6-1/5 of the overall daily growing volunteer contributions:

jeremy;
It's a pity you have to handle these anti-GE anti-GM people with kid gloves. Not one in a hundred has clue one about what they're objecting to.

**Edited for intolerance**

Yes JohnQ118, where were you with all the work to compute?

Welcome back to volunteer crunching.