The molecular recognition group participated in this five-week competition against teams from 40 countries that set out to advance the field of AI protein design by demonstrating how AI-designed novel proteins can target cancer cells.

Proteins carry out almost all cellular functions, from carrying the oxygen in our blood to defending our cells from disease. To do their work, proteins need to interact with each other – in a similar way to how we use our hands to interact with different objects to write, type or ride a bicycle.

Read more about UF’s Perez Lab Gators Team Wins International AI Protein Design Competition.

Understanding how proteins interact with each other is crucial for developing new treatments and understanding diseases. Thanks to computational advances, a team of researchers led by Assistant Professor of Chemistry Alberto Perez have developed a groundbreaking algorithm to identify these molecular interactions.

Perez’s research team included two graduate students from UF, Arup Mondal and Bhumika Singh, and a handful of researchers from Rutgers University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The team published their findings in Angewandte Chemie, a leading chemistry journal based in Germany.

Named the AF-CBA Pipeline, this innovative tool offers unparalleled accuracy and speed in pinpointing the strongest peptide binders to a specific protein. It does this by using AI to simulate molecular interactions, sorting through thousands of candidate molecules to identify the molecule that interacts best with the protein of interest.