The Nutritious Rice for the World Scientist have provided an update on the Nutritious Rice for the World project, which was included in the June, 2009 Newsletter. You may review the newsletter online here, or for your convenience the update is as follows:

Nutritious Rice for the World, Computational Biology Research Group, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
We have begun to analyze the protein models generated by Nutritious Rice for the World volunteers. The next step is to use sophisticated methods to select the top protein models for each gene. This will let us focus on a more manageable number of protein structures from the billions generated so far. Rice proteins are very different from what has been previously studied and only 1% of the proteins we're working on have segments which are significantly similar to proteins of known structure. That is why computer modeling is necessary and why this project is important. It also means that we have a lot of hard work ahead of us still!

In general, when proteins have similar amino acid sequences, they also have similar structures. The small number of cases where at least part of the protein sequence is similar to one where the structure is known is thus very useful. We have a good idea what those regions of the protein structure model should look like and this allows us to optimize and validate the tools that we use to pick the best models. That is what we are currently doing. Once we finish this, we will start processing the data and publish the best structures for each gene online.