Research into "weird" species There's a ton of money that goes into research of well-known plant species like rice, wheat, maize etc. However, there are myria

Research into "weird" species There's a ton of money that goes into research of well-known plant species like rice, wheat, maize etc. However, there are myriads of species where we know not much beyond the taxonomic assignment and getting funding to research these species is a drag ("How do you want to monetize that?"). Yet there's a wealth of novel resistances, food sources, medicines, biochemical pathways etc. hidden away in these species, there's just no funding. There are some companies which sponsor small research projects into organisms like that (edit: mostly for advertising purposes), for example PacBio awards one genome assembly project of the "most interesting species" (read: underfunded). This species won last time: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15714.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... It's a weird tiny grass which can completely dry out and then come back to live, imagine what we could do when we'd take this pathway out and put it into wheat! Completely unresearched (Google Scholar has 122 papers mentioning the name, edit: Oryza sativa (rice) has 387,000) yet massive potential. It may not be the best fit to your funding scheme because research like this goes far beyond 5 years. Disclaimer: I work in plant bioinformatics (canola) Later Edit: There's also experiment.com for crowdfunding research, but it's really hard to get a project crowdfunded if it's unpopular (compare: "We have this tiny plant we know nothing about" vs. "We have this tiny plant that may cure cancer", maybe the plant you know nothing about does that too?). YC could fit its funding scheme above "single project" and below "decades long funding"