Plastic waste is projected to triple by 2060, yet less than 10 percent is ever recycled, according to the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook. The Align Foundation has launched the 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament, a global open-science challenge that uses AI and lab testing to improve enzymes capable of breaking down plastic waste. It is one of the first competitions to pair AI-driven enzyme design with large-scale experimental validation.

The response has been global: more than 290 teams from 40 countries have already registered to tackle PETase, the plastic-degrading enzyme at the heart of the challenge. The tournament is backed by sponsors including Twist Bioscience, Modal Labs, and EvolutionaryScale.

Why PETase

PETase can break down PET into reusable monomers that can be made into new, high-quality plastic. Unlike traditional recycling, which often downgrades plastic into lower-value products, enzymatic recycling offers true circularity: reducing landfill waste, cutting demand for petroleum, and enabling sustainable manufacturing.

For over a decade, researchers have struggled to engineer PETase that can withstand the harsh conditions of recycling plants. The enzyme must remain active at high temperatures, tolerate swings in pH, and act on solid plastic. These hurdles have stalled progress, even as plastic pollution costs the world more than $1.5 trillion annually in health-related economic losses (The Lancet Commission on Plastics, 2023) and between $500 billion and $2.5 trillion per year in lost marine ecosystem services (UNEP estimate reported by NCEL, 2019). The Protein Engineering Tournament addresses this challenge by crowdsourcing innovation and validating new enzyme variants under real-world conditions.

How the Tournament Works

High-visibility challenges have sparked breakthroughs before: DARPA’s Grand Challenge seeded today’s autonomous vehicle industry, and CASP transformed protein structure prediction. Benchmarks give a field a common test, allowing competing approaches to be compared under the same conditions. Align’s Protein Engineering Tournament aims to do the same for protein function.

“Creating a benchmark that scientists can rally around is a powerful way to advance a field,” said Erika DeBenedictis, PhD, co-founder of The Align Foundation. “This tournament sets that benchmark for functional protein engineering by testing whether models can deliver enzymes that aren’t just structurally correct, but actually work in the real world.”

The tournament begins December 1st and will unfold in two phases:

• Predictive phase: Teams use AI models to predict how PETase sequences will perform in the lab, with experimental results produced by independent external partners under standardized conditions.
• Generative phase: Teams design new, enhanced PETase sequences which will be synthesized and experimentally compared to existing best-in-class PETase benchmarks.

Twist Bioscience, the competition’s DNA synthesis sponsor, will provide variant libraries and gene fragments to build a first-of-its-kind functional dataset for PETase. They will also synthesize DNA encoding novel PETase sequences designed by the competing teams. By supplying the synthetic DNA that bridges digital designs with biological results, Twist ensures that every team’s ideas can be tested fairly and potentially be turned into tangible breakthroughs.

“Synthetic DNA plays a critical role in AI-based discovery, from providing researchers with sequences and datasets to train their models, and the validation of those models in the wet lab,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. “With both library and gene synthesis, we support end-to-end development of novel algorithms to discover new PETase enzymes for plastic degradation, ensuring each team's designs can be validated and tested fairly in the lab.”

EvolutionaryScale, the AI sponsor, will give participants access to state-of-the-art protein language models developed by them.

Modal Labs will provide participants with compute on their platform, enabling them to quickly parallelize intensive computational testing of their models.

These sponsorships, along with robust experimental testing enabled by Align, will ensure that teams compete on ideas rather than availability of infrastructure.

Who’s Participating

The tournament is organized by The Align Foundation, with technical leadership from Bijoy Desai, PhD, Align’s tournament program manager, and an interdisciplinary planning committee spanning academia, biotech, and AI.

Registered participants range from leading academic groups, including the Frances Arnold Lab at Caltech and the Baker Lab at the University of Washington, to AI-driven companies like Profluent, alongside hundreds of other teams worldwide. Participation is free, and all experimental work is handled by Align so teams can focus on modeling and design.

Building on Prior Success

Align piloted this approach in 2023 with an amylase engineering competition that drew 30 teams and published results in Proteins. The 2025 tournament expands that model in scale and ambition. Success could accelerate sustainable plastic recycling and establish a reusable framework for enzyme design, while even failure will map the limits of today’s methods and guide the next wave of progress.

Learn more and register: https://alignbio.org/protein-engineering-tournament-2025.

About The Align Foundation

The Align Foundation is a research nonprofit launched in 2021 to make life sciences more predictive. Align enables the building of large, open biological datasets through high-throughput experimentation, automation partnerships, and global scientific collaboration. Align also hosts competitions to transparently benchmark scientific progress and measure the impact of open data. With support from philanthropic funders, Align is creating the reproducible, scalable, and shareable infrastructure needed to unlock the next generation of data-powered breakthroughs in biology. Learn more at alignbio.org.

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“Creating a benchmark that scientists can rally around is a powerful way to advance a field” — Erika DeBenedictis, PhD, co-founder of The Align Foundation.