The Tournament
A protein engineering competition employing high-throughput automation and cloud lab experimentation.
THE PROTEIN ENGINEERING TOURNAMENT
The Tournament provides a transparent platform for fostering collaboration, evaluating progress, and establishing benchmarks in the field.
The Protein Engineering Tournament fosters advances in AI x Bio and evolves upon classic protein design competitions by employing high-throughput automation and cloud lab experimentation. The Tournament empowers computational scientists to move beyond the confines of the dry lab to benchmark their protein design techniques in silico and in vitro.
During the Tournament, participants use protein function datasets to progress from predicting properties to designing proteins. Cloud lab methods are developed to generate datasets for the competition and evaluate the final protein designs, selecting the winners through experimentation. This cycle generates open-source, dynamic datasets and standardized, automated protocols for the community for continued benchmarking by future teams.
The 2023 pilot Protein Engineering Tournament results are coming soon!
FROM THE 2023 TOURNAMENT
7
final teams, including: 3 academic, 2 industry, and 2 mixed teams
85
users registered to access the data across 28 teams
18655
datapoints across
all datasets
6
donated datasets from 2 industry and 4 academic groups
1200
unique protein sequences submitted for in vitro characterization
How does the Tournament work?
The Tournament consists of two rounds, the in silico, and in vitro.
(A) in silico round
Participants predict properties of given protein sequences, with optional training data provided for specific events. Performance is evaluated by comparing the participant’s predictions with the ground-truth values. Top performing participants are selected to advance to the in vitro round.
(B) in vitro round
Participants are asked to generate protein sequences based on desired properties, which are then be expressed and characterized in vitro. Performance of the designed sequences are evaluated as a weighted combination of the protein’s properties; the exact evaluation metric will be event-dependent.
Powered by Community Leadership
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Mohamed Hassan Kane
Medium Biosciences
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Dave Estell
International Flavors & Fragrances
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Chase Armer
Columbia University
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Adil Yusuf
Medium Biosciences
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Henning Redestig
International Flavors & Fragrances
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Dana Cortade
Align to Innovate
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TJ Brunette
Align to Innovate
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Pete Kelly
Align to Innovate
How can I get involved?
I would like to participate in the next Tournament !
We invite academic, industry, and mixed teams to participate, from anywhere around the world!
Sign up as a team of one or with your lab mates or colleagues.
I would like to contribute a dataset to the Tournament!
Academic and industry groups are invited to sponsor Tournament ‘Events’ by providing datasets and their associated challenge problems.
I would like to organize the next Tournament!
Our Planning Committee is open to new members! The planning committee works with Align to Innovate to coordinate, judge, and plan upcoming Tournaments.
Contact us at at tournament@alignbio.org
Sign up here to hear about the next Tournament.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Participation in Round 1 is free and open to everyone from high school students to Deepmind.
Free Participation in Round 2 is offered to top performers in Round 1. -
The pilot is a ‘dress rehearsal’ of the tournament. Participants in the pilot will have the opportunity to provide feedback and suggestions on the timeline, logistics, and scoring.
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Sequences in the in-silico phase may have been patented previously.
The submitted sequences will be shared freely with the broader community.
All methods belong to the teams.We ask teams to not knowingly infringe on IP.
Still have more questions?
Email us at tournament@alignbio.org.
