The University of North Dakota Citizen Science Grid is run by Travis Desell, an Assistant Professor in UND's Computer Science Department. It is hosted by UND's Computational Research Center and Information Technology Systems and Services. The CSG is dedicated to supporting a wide range of research and educational projects using volunteer computing and citizen science, which you can read about and visit below.
Transcription factors have "fingers" that prefeo a certain short, sloppy pattern in the nucleotides "letters" of a DNA sequence, but in many cases we don't know what these patterns are. Our software looks for short sequences of nucleotides that appear more-or-less the same near multiple gene beginnings and which also appear more-or-less the same in the corresponding locations in the genomes of related species. As DNA sequences are huge, ranging from millions to billions of nucleotides, and these sequences are short and only approximately conserved from one site to the next, this is a real needle-in-the-haystack problem and requires lots of computational power.
Depending on how you measure the size of the problem instance, there is evidence that Subset Sum is actually an easier problem that most of the others in its class. The goal of this project is to strengthen the evidence that Subset Sum is an easier hard problem.
