Rapamycin and TR4 (Banana fungus)

[wuffy68]

Are there any results from the Rapamycin studies (projects 10491-10499) that could lead to solving the Cavendish Banana Fusarium Oxysporum (#TR4) fungus problem currently threatening crop yields around the world? Monoculture is the underlying cause, but could targeted antifungals be a bridge in the transition to more sustainable cultivation?

[JimboPalmer]

[I am just a user like you, I have no special 'inside' knowledge]

No one has tackled this, perhaps no one can, so I will try to explain why we don't know.

F@H data is 'open source', just like open source software there are many options.

F@H does not require any documentation that their data was used, a company is free to make believe they did that research, rather than just taking our data.
This undoubtedly allows more groups to use the data, a good thing. Sadly, it blinds us volunteers to what good our work does. We may never know. Stanford may never know. It is even possible that the officers of the company do not know.

I can live with this, but if it annoys you, F@H may not be the project for you.

Sorry.

[JimF]

If the work was picked up in other academic studies, then it was probably cited and could be traced accordingly. But as Jimbo says, if a company uses it, then it may just disappear into the mind of a researcher and reappear later as a product trial, if we are lucky.

If a patent resulted from the product development, then the work could be cited there too. But most studies don't make it anywhere near the product stage.

[wuffy68]

No one has tackled this, perhaps no one can, so I will try to explain why we don't know.

F@H data is 'open source', just like open source software there are many options.

Nothing to be sorry for ... I've worked on open source projects and referenced code samples, so the sharing paradigm is familiar. I think if a private lab or company were to pick up the resulting data, they would have to request the data set from the consortium, so the consortium would be aware of who was using it. The data set's are no longer available to download anonymously (to my understanding)...

That said, the resulting paper "Mechanistically distinct cancer-associated mTOR activation clusters predict sensitivity to rapamycin" has been cited in 34 other studies, which I think is totally cool! ... but none appear related to anti-fungals.

I'm wondering if there's enough "marketing" of the data set, for lack of a better word, to let the scientific community working on TR4 know it exists.

[JimF]

I'm wondering if there's enough "marketing" of the data set, for lack of a better word, to let the scientific community working on TR4 know it exists.

Vijay Panda has gone off to the venture capital world. If there is a way of marketing it, he will probably find it.