Protein structure identification- crowd sourcing technology



Protein structure identification- crowd sourcing technology

Introduction

Modern science is filled with challenges of massive scale. From classifying terabytes of astronomical images to annotating gigabases of genome sequence, many of these challenges require enormous amounts of human effort (Quinn 2011).

Chromosomes

Maize has 10 chromosomes (n=10, 2n=20). The total genetic length of these chromosomes is roughly 1500cM. Many maize chromosomes have chromosomal knobs, or highly repetitive heterchromatic regions which stain darkly on chromosome spreads (see figure below) (Quinn 2011). Individual knobs are polymorphic among races of maize and the various teosinte. In fact, they make excellent cytogenetic markers, and ...