Reclone Community Meeting on Jul 16th at 14:00 UTC ✨

Events
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Hello Reclone Community :wave:

You’re all invited to our Community Meeting later this month, on 2025-07-16T14:00:00Z. This will be another slightly longer session (up to 1.5h) as we have two talks scheduled!

:arrow_right: Join us via Zoom: Launch Meeting - Zoom

For our first talk, we will hear from Manu Lera-Ramirez @manulera (University College London, UK), presenting about OpenCloning, an Open Source web application for DNA engineering design that supports automation and integration with research software.

OpenCloning is an Open-Source web application to plan and document cloning and genome engineering. It allows researchers to design a cloning strategy through an intuitive web interface or programmatically, and provides a standardised data model to represent cloning strategies. Researchers can: import plasmid and genome sequences; plan cloning and design primers; plan strain and cell line engineering via CRISPR and homologous recombination; automate repetitive cloning and primer design; and much more.

For our second talk, we will hear from Bijoy Desai (The Align Foundation, US) and learn more about The 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament: A Community Benchmark for Predictive and Generative Models in PETase Engineering.

The Align Foundation is a nonprofit organization that works to propel biology into a new era of reproducible, scalable, and shareable research. Our vision is to accelerate the field by development of powerful predictive models. To get there, we have developed a suite of programs designed to enable collaborative, large, data intensive projects supported by automated methods. As a part of our community benchmarking initiative we host the Protein Engineering Tournament that is designed to benchmark predictive and generative models in protein engineering, offering a platform for critical assessment and collaborative learning-similar to what Critical Assessment of Structural Prediction (CASP) has achieved for protein structure prediction.

Feel free to invite and share news to others in your networks who might be interested :star_struck:

You can also check our previous meetings at Events – Reagent Collaboration Network or via the Reclone YouTube channel.
Likewise, you can see the Upcoming Events on the Reclone Calendar, tell us you’re Interested/Going, and add these to your own calendar.

See you all at the meeting!

2025_Jul_2_ManuLeraRamirez
2025_Jul_2_ManuLeraRamirez1080×1080 108 KB
2025_Jul_2_BijoyDesai
2025_Jul_2_BijoyDesai1080×1080 101 KB

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Unlike commercial alternatives, OpenCloning uses the first ever Open Data Model to represent cloning strategies, and supports integration with research software.

For instance, they already have a working integration with an Electronic Lab Notebook.

You can access OpenCloning for free online at or run your own instance locally.

Try it: https://opencloning.org/

Demo video: https://github.com/manulera/OpenCloning/blob/master/demo_video.md

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Thanks @cibele! Looking forward to it

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We are very excited to announce our second talk! :tada:

We will hear from Bijoy Desai (The Align Foundation, US) and learn more about The 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament: A Community Benchmark for Predictive and Generative Models in PETase Engineering.

This year’s Tournament will focus on the enzyme target polyethylene terephthalate hydrolase (PETase), with real world impact in eliminating microplastics, and development of a circular plastic economy. We are in the late stage of planning the Tournament, which will take place in two consecutive phases: 1) Predictive, where competitors will be challenged to predict withheld protein function data, and 2) Generative, where competitors will be challenged to design novel enzymes with improved properties. As a part of Align Foundation’s mission to make data for AI open, reproducible, and shareable, we will generate and release a training dataset around PETase sequences that the participants can use for supervised learning in the predictive and generative phases. In the generative phase we will obtain novel PETase sequences designed by the different computational modelling methods employed by the participants and generate experimental data for them to assess the ability of each model to improve multiple properties.

The tournament is scheduled to begin November 3rd 2025 and end on April 10th 2026. Check out more at: 2025 Tournament — Align to Innovate

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Hi Everyone,

Looking forward to seeing you all this time tomorrow 2025-07-16T14:00:00Z to hear from @manulera and Bijoy Desai talk on different biological tools and platforms that can make our research projects more reproducible and shareable. :tada:

:arrow_up: See the joining links in the first post above!

But before you go, here are two quick polls about synbio tools and competitions - we’d love to hear your thoughts!

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:arrow_forward: (1) What kind of tools do you use when designing and documenting sequences and constructs?
We’d be interested to know what you like using, don’t like using - and your reasons why! Feel free to let us know what features are a must have for you, and what you would like to have but haven’t yet seen put into place! :eyes:
This is a non-comprehensive list, so do let us know what other tools, repositories, electronic lab notebooks (ELNs), laboratory information management system (LIMS) etc. that you use!

What kind of tools do you use when designing and documenting sequences and constructs?
0 voters

For those who are interested, we came across this ELN comparison matrix from 2021 by the Longwood Medical Area Research Data Management Working Group, and further lists of ELNs and LIMS software, which might be of interest

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:arrow_forward: (2) Have you taken part/been involved in these synthetic biology/engineering biology competitions?
Tell us about your experiences of them! :eyes:

Have you taken part/been involved in these synthetic biology/engineering biology competitions?
0 voters