Announcing the winners of the Winter Protein Design Games 2024: Unleashing Innovation in Enzyme Engineering
The Winter RosettaCon organizers want to thank Liberum Bio for sponsoring the experimental validation of the designs that they carried out in 8 days starting from digital sequences! Liberum Bio produces proteins at high yields in cell-free systems at a fraction of the usual cost and time via highly engineered strains and state-of-the art reaction mixtures. At Winter RosettaCon 2024 in Boston, the Rosetta Commons in partnership with Liberum Biotech hosted the inaugural Winter Protein Design Games , focusing on the design of Tobacco Etch Virus (TEV) protease variants. TEV protease is commonly used as a tool for sequence-specific protein cleavage, facilitating the purification of proteins without affinity tags. The competition challenged cross-institutional participating teams to engineer TEV proteases that exhibited enhanced substrate cleavage efficiency over the wild-type enzyme. The competition was straightforward: design TEV protease variants that outperform the wild type in cleavi