Description for the general public

Life Science and Engineering

The diversity of living organisms on earth is determined in large part by
what genes are expressed in each organism.

The number of genes in the smallest independently living organisms can be
as small as few hundreds and this number can grow to tens of thousands
in humans, mammals or plants.

The genomic revolution revealed that the majority of genes in living
organisms code for proteins that don't have a a precisely defined
biochemical function.

These proteins (without functional assignment) are potentially performing
very important enzymatic, regulatory, communication or control functions.

Moreover these proteins without assigned functions are often found in all
organisms from E.coli to Human.

Identifying the function of these genes can revolutionize our ability to
design drugs (that inhibit the activity of these key proteins),
identify genes that can be targetted to extend or improve human life
engineer highly efficient bacteria that can produce clean energy, or
identify new functions that can be used in yet unforseen medical, engineering
or environmenal applications.


Computer Science

When Pablo Picasso was first told about computers he commented:

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers".

The main focus of Scibay is to compute,
store, enable people to search and browse intelligently a space of
actual computational predictions such as

Does Protein X have Function F?

The novel problem we are trying to address computationally (among many) is
what makes a scientific question interesting and how do we represent
deep searchable knowledge on the web.

These predictions or computable questions would be tested/answered by
biologists using small pilots ($) that we will award in response to
electronically submitted bids.

We hope this approach will have a transformative impact on science.

Economy

In the short term the project will create 40 or more jobs and will enable
or test a number of new technologies that can be turned into successful
start-ups.