Dear World Community Grid volunteers,
We are thrilled to tell you about our new project, Uncovering Genome Mysteries.
Antibiotics such as Penicillin, bacteria that clean up oil spills, and asprin are just a few of the many valuable products we discovered in organisms, small and large, in the soil, water and forests. This area of study is still in its infancy: most of the organisms in Earth's biosphere have yet to be identified, let alone understood at the genetic level.
Uncovering Genome Mysteries plans to change that by examining close to 200 million genes from a wide variety of life forms, such as microorganisms found on seaweeds from Australian coastlines and in the Amazon river. The predicted proteins they encode will be compared against each other to assess their similarity. When two proteins are similar, and the function of one protein is already known, this similarity allows scientists to make educated predictions about the function of the other. Uncovering Genome Mysteries will create and publish a database of protein sequence comparison information for all scientists to reference.
The scale of the task is enormous. It is only feasible thanks to the massive computational power of World Community Grid. While sequences from all forms of life will be processed, microorganisms will receive a special focus.
The goals of the project are to:
? Discover new protein functions and augmenting knowledge about biochemical processes in general
? Identify how organisms interact with each other and the environment
? Document the current baseline microbial diversity
? Understand and model complex microbial systems
You can find more in-depth information and explanations about the project here .
We hope you will find our project interesting, and support its goals. With your help, we will discover many mysteries of the microbial world and how that knowledge can help solve human and world problems.
Torsten Thomas and Wim Degrave
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