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alignbio.bsky.social
The Align Foundation
@alignbio.bsky.social
Improving life science with programmable experiments. 🧬 🤖 Home of the Protein Engineering Tournament & Open Datasets Initiative.
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To ensure the highest impact and participation, we are adjusting the timeline of the Protein Engineering Tournament. The Tournament will now begin on December 1st, 2025.
October 15, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by The Align Foundation
🧫 Meet the keynote speakers for the 2025 scverse conference!
Erika Alden DeBenedictis, Co-founder of The Align Foundation & CEO of Pioneer Labs

@erika-alden.bsky.social
@alignbio.bsky.social
@pioneerlabs.bsky.social

#scverse #scverse2025 #StructuralBiology #Biotech #Stanford
August 26, 2025 at 2:36 PM
📣 Evolutionary Scale is supporting the 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament!

Teams get sponsored ESM inference through
@evolutionaryscale.bsky.social's API (Forge), bringing frontier protein AI models into the competition.

Level playing field, real experiments, open results. Register now 👇
August 21, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Thrilled to welcome Amanda Reider Apel to The Align Foundation as Director of Protein Projects! 🚀 A biotech leader who builds high-impact science and thriving teams, she’ll drive protein engineering strategy while fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration.
August 19, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Why PETase for our tournament? In 2024, the world made about 30 million tonnes of PET plastic, most from fossil fuels.

PETase can degrade PET, but isn’t ready for industrial-scale waste. The challenge: design an improved variant that can change that.

Register by Oct 17 alignbio.org/protein-engi...
August 13, 2025 at 5:38 PM
1/4 We just published the 1st-year update on GROQ-seq: an open access, high-throughput experimental platform capable of testing hundreds of thousands of protein variants per run, running @ NIST and the DAMP Lab. Here’s what we built, learned, and what’s next:

#GROQseq #syntheticbiology
July 21, 2025 at 2:58 PM
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🚀 Announcing the 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament.

This year’s challenge: design PETase enzymes, which degrade the type of plastic in bottles. Can AI-guided protein design help solve the climate crisis? Let’s find out! ⬇️

#AIforBiology #ClimateTech #ProteinEngineering #OpenScience
July 8, 2025 at 4:26 PM
🚨 Align × ATCC are partnering to build the world’s largest public microbial phenotyping dataset.
✅ 1K strains
✅ 1K conditions
✅ 1M reproducible experiments
✅ Open access
This experimental platform will use high-throughput automation, linked to ATCC’s authenticated genomes.
June 18, 2025 at 1:59 PM
Align's GROQ-seq platform just turned 1 🎂 it now supports 7 protein function projects across 6 labs worldwide. 300k variants measured per run @ <$0.05 each, and it works. Not theory. Real infrastructure. Open to the world. 🔗 1-year technical report → hubs.la/Q03mSrW_0
May 16, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Measuring precise enzyme kinetics (like kcat and Km) is key to understanding enzyme function. But these measurements are most often conducted in singleplex in vitro assays - expensive and tough to scale. 1/7 🧵👇
April 28, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Q1 at Align =
✅ Team doubled
✅ 65k GROQ-seq datapoints
✅ Genotype-by-Phenotype platform
✅ Global conf. circuit
✅ Tournament prep underway

Get the full download → hubs.la/Q03hT_V60
#ProteinEngineering #AIxBiology #SynBio #OpenScience
April 17, 2025 at 6:30 PM
🚀 New proposal from Align! The experimental platform aims to standardize #microbial #phenotyping & support predictive modeling. 🦠 Capturing data across 1k strains & 1k conditions; using BacterAI; generating high-quality datasets for ML @jensen_lab
Genotype to Phenotype: Design of an Extensible Experimental Platform for Characterizing Microbes
zenodo.org
March 13, 2025 at 8:58 PM
We are gearing up for our 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament! 🧬 🏆

Have ideas on what the next community benchmarking competition for protein design and engineering should look like? 💡 💪 Join our organizing committee here: https://buff.ly/3ELqfrb
February 19, 2025 at 7:30 PM
🚀 Collaborative, AI-Ready datasets would revolutionize life sciences and catalyze progress. Government funding plays a critical role in making this a reality.

📖 Read our policy memo here:
Kickstarting Collaborative, AI-Ready Datasets in the Life Sciences
The government should fund collaborative roadmapping, certification, collection, and sharing of large, high-quality datasets in life science.
buff.ly
January 9, 2025 at 4:24 PM
🚀 News from Align! Today, we're sharing our proposal for building a predictive model of protein expression. Check it out here! ➡️ https://buff.ly/3OqtPZf ⬅️

🌍✨#ProteinExpression #Bioengineering #Collaboration #MachineLearning #DataScience #AlignToInnovate
December 3, 2024 at 4:45 PM
🌟 Congrats to Cradle on their Series B raise! 🌟 www.cradle.bio/blog/series-b
www.cradle.bio
November 26, 2024 at 11:10 AM