The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (the Gates Foundation), the Seeker for this Wazoku Crowd Challenge, seeks innovative methods to identify plant proteins most vulnerable to elevated temperature, aiming to develop targets for the engineering of resilient crops important to smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries.
This Challenge has two main goals. First, Solvers must develop an approach to identifying thermosensitive proteins using protein structure modeling. Second, they need to use this approach to create a list of proteins with the highest potential for structural instability under elevated temperature. Solvers can use several crops to develop their approach, including those with lower temperature optima (such as common bean or wheat) and those with higher optima (such as cowpea and millets) as well as known extremophiles.
YourIP Rights are protected in this Prize Challenge; the Gates Foundation must award you to obtain them.
The best solution has the opportunity to win an Award of $25,000 for meeting all solution requirements. The Challenge requires a written proposal to be submitted and Awards will be contingent upon the theoretical evaluation of the proposal by the Gates Foundation against the Solution Requirements. To receive an Award, Solvers are required to grant non-exclusive rights to the Intellectual Property (IP) in their proposed solution.
There is no assignment of IP Rights with this challenge. Solvers will retain all rights to any proposal not Awarded.
Gates Foundation Global Access and Intellectual Property.
Global Access means the knowledge and information gained from the awarded solutions will be made available and accessible at an affordable price to people most in need within developing countries.
The management of intellectual property rights are likely to play an important role in achieving the goals of the Challenge, you should seriously consider your willingness to submit a solution in compliance with the Gates Foundation Global Access Statement which can be found here: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Information/Global-Access-Statement.
Due diligence activities will be conducted against solutions of interest which may include inquiry into your:
1) Freedom to operate and ability to freely use and acquire needed background technology; and
2) Commitment to promote the utilization, commercialization and availability of your solution for public benefit.
Global temperatures continue to rise, both on average and as the increasing frequency and severity of acute high temperature occurrences.
This phenomenon causes many socio-economic problems; one of them is the threat to food security. This is particularly true in low-income countries of the global South where greater climate instability is expected to have a more devastating impact on the food supply.
All crops, including those important as food sources, have a temperature optimum for growth and development. Temperatures rising above this optimum compromise crop productivity and eventually result in crop failure.
At the core of crop sensitivity to temperatures above their optimum lies impaired protein function. Consistent with the whole plant response, proteins have a temperature optimum for their proper function, and constantly rising temperatures lead to increasing deficiency in protein activity.
One way to address this problem is to engineer crops whose proteins will be more thermo-resistant and capable of maintaining activity at elevated temperatures. However, this can only be achieved if we’re able to identify proteins that are most vulnerable to increased temperature.
Recently, some important targets that could be modified for increased thermal tolerance of crops have been identified (for example, Rubisco Activase). However, this information comes from individual biochemical and physiological studies; there is no clear understanding of the scope of protein thermo-instability in crop plants at a proteome level that would allow a more durable strategy for crop improvement.
At the same time, recent developments in plant genomics, proteomics, and protein structure modeling using Machine Learning and AI approaches can make the identification of temperature sensitive proteins in crops more systematic and scalable.
The objective of this Challenge is to develop a protein structure approach that would identify crop proteins most vulnerable to temperature increase.
The proteome of many plants is known, including those adapted to temperate environments (for example, common wheat, Triticum aestivum; and common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris), those adapted to higher temperature environments (for example, cowpea, Vigna unguiculata; and millets, Paniceae sp.), and extreme temperatures (so-called extremophiles, such as a variety of resurrection plants).
We envision that these proteomes can serve as a starting point to identifying proteins that would be sensitive to high temperature—and we want to emphasize that we’re only interested in approaches that rely solely of protein structure, not their function (as derived from physiological and biochemical studies).
We further anticipate that the proposed algorithm will be applied to the proteome of wheat and common bean to identify the most vulnerable temperature-sensitive proteins, with appropriate rationale justifying this selection (supported by physiological and/or biochemical data, if available). The number of identified proteins should be within the limits of plant engineering (<20 individual proteins).
Deadline:- 05-03-2025
