In 2023, Align launched the inaugural Protein Engineering Tournament: a proof-of-concept competition that brought together academic, industry, and independent teams to test protein design models against real-world experimental validation. The theme: enzyme function prediction and design.
This pilot tested whether community challenges could generate rigorous, comparable benchmarks that the community would jump on. The result was a resounding yes.
7 finalist teams (3 academic, 2 industry, 2 mixed)
85 registered users across 28 teams
>40,000 data points across six protein datasets
1,200 unique sequences synthesized and tested
6 datasets contributed from 4 academic and 2 industry groups
Participants competed in two rounds:
In silico round: Teams predicted properties of enzyme variants using provided sequences and (in some cases) training data.
In vitro round: Top teams designed new enzyme variants for experimental testing. Align partnered with International Flavors and Fragrances to synthesize and test submissions to determine the winner.
Six datasets were donated for this pilot Tournament, covering diverse enzymes including aminotransferase, α-amylase, imine reductase, and more. All data, code, and results are openly available on GitHub.
Awarded for the top-performing Amylase variant, measured by activity while maintaining thermostability and expression thresholds.
In Silico Zero-Shot Champion: Marks lab
In Silico Supervised Tie: ExaZyme and Nimbus
In Silico Overall Winner: Nimbus
In Vitro Winner & Overall Tournament Champion: TUM Rostlab
Zero-shot and Supervised Leaderboards Image (Align to get for Receptor, in progress)
This pilot set the stage for future tournaments with broader scope, bigger datasets, and more ambitious challenges—starting with the 2025 PETase Tournament now underway.
If you have a dataset to share, want to host a challenge event, or are interested in sponsoring wet-lab evaluation, reach out at tournament@alignbio.org.
Ready to compete? Join the 2025 Tournament →