IBM Joins Quest for Better Chocolate

Lest we be left to suffer a life with inferior chocolate, candy bar maker Mars is partnering with IBM and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a five-year project to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa genome, reports The New York Times.

Not only is the world's sweet tooth at risk from tropical diseases, pests and climate change, so is the livelihood of 6.5 million small family cocoa farmers around the world, the candy maker says.

Scientists expect it will take about a year to extract the raw DNA from cocoa, then three IBM scientists will analyze the data, The Washington Post reports.

The use of computational biologists and supercomputers can speed production of promising new strains of cocoa trees from the traditional five to seven years to 18 months or so, according to the Times story.