Background:
- CH4 Global is on a mission to help save our planet by slashing harmful methane emissions from ruminant livestock e.g. cows.
- Feeding Asparagopsis seaweed products to cows has been proven to cut their methane emissions by up to 90% – which globally would remove more CO2 equivalent emissions than USA, Europe and India combined. The UN most recent climate report state “to save the planet, focus on cutting methane”.
- The process includes:
- Hatchery where we trigger sores to release onto seeded lines
- Nursery where the spores are grown out until they are ready to be deployed
- Grow-out can be done in tank farms, pond farms or marine farms
- Harvesting of fully grown seaweed
- Processing to remove water and prepare raw material for
- Formulation into finished feed supplements suitable for farm type.
- The seaweed contains bromoform (CHBr3) which, is the “active” ingredient. In the cow’s gut bromoform works by disrupting the enzymes of gut microbes that live in the cow’s stomach, and that produce methane gas as waste during digestion. Net result, up to a 90% reduction of methane gas in cow burps.
Problem: Today we see significant loss of bromoform at harvest. Today the seaweed is removed from the lines, kept under water in string bags until it is checked to remove other seaweeds and debris. The Asparagopsis is then flash frozen. Measurements of wet seaweed have indicated that up to 50% of bromoform is lost between removal from the lines until after flash freezing.
Challenge for team:
- Develop a hypothesis of why there is bromoform loses during harvest.
- Identify an analogous problem that has been at least partially solved.
- Recommend a plan of experiments to prove/disprove hypothesis.
Background:
- We founded Totus Medicines with the mission of making every disease treatable by making the entire human genome druggable.
- Totus is doing this by creating a platform that can screen drugs at a scale 100,000X greater than conventional methods. (billions of compounds per day against thousands of targets).
- The process includes:
- Exponentially Evolving Chemistry Drug Library
- Cellular Screening for Billions of Compounds
- AI/Machine Learning Portal for Drug Design
- The Totus platform is an advanced screening technology, one that combines the power of high throughput chemistry approaches with machine learning techniques to create treatments for the most intractable diseases.
Problem: Today we see significant advancement utilizing computational tools to understand the basis of how our genes and proteins function at an atomic level. Notably, the Google Deepmind Project has helped unlock the atomic level protein structures of every gene in the human genome. However, while we understand the structure of proteins, we now need to develop drugs to manipulate these protein to combat disease. The goal of this project is to bridge the gap between the Google Deepmind Project and Drug Discovery.
Challenge for team:
- Develop a hypothesis for integration of Deepmind/Alphafold with Drug Molecules.
- Utilize publicly available computational docking tools to dock molecules to Alphafold Structures
- Recommend a plan of experiments to prove/disprove hypothesis.