AI-SynBio Innovation Challenge (Application Portal for Overseas Universities)

To the life engineers of tomorrow:

Four billion years ago, nature wrote the most exquisite code of all using only four letters. Every bird in flight, every forest, every heartbeat is a runtime of that program. For the past two centuries we have learned to read life — from Mendel’s peas to the Human Genome Project. In the past two decades we have begun to write it — synthetic biology turning genes into composable parts and cells into programmable factories.

Today, the arrival of artificial intelligence is, for the first time, making that ancient grammar predictable, designable, and engineerable. AlphaFold has compressed a doctorate’s worth of protein structure prediction into minutes. Diffusion models can generate enzymes nature never saw. Large language models have begun to read the language of genes and molecules. Computation is no longer merely an aid to experiment — it is becoming the starting point of design.

And yet we know clearly: the real breakthroughs never happen on the “dry” side alone, nor on the “wet” side alone, but in the closed loop between them. AI offers a bold hypothesis; experiment answers with rigorous data; data feeds back into the model, bringing the next prediction one step closer to truth. This is the essence of the Design–Build–Test–Learn (DBTL) cycle in engineering biology — and it is the core conviction of this Challenge.

This competition is neither a pure algorithm contest nor a traditional wet-lab showdown

The AI+Synthetic Biology Innovation Challenge is an interdisciplinary research competition for university students worldwide, committed to advancing the deep integration of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology — and, through it, to addressing real-world questions of our time: serving public health, powering the new productive forces, and lifting the quality of everyday life.

•  Track A · AI / Computational

• Track B · Synthetic Biology

• Bronze：the project delivers substantive dry-lab (AI/computational) work, with complete documentation, code, and presentation.
• Silver：on top of Bronze, the project introduces a wet-lab dimension and advances both tracks in parallel.

• Gold：the project demonstrates dry–wet closed-loop validation, with meaningful iteration between AI and experiment.

Bring your code and your pipettes, and help us write the next sentence of synthetic biology！

⬇️⬇️⬇️

/ The application deadline is April 30, 2026. /

-we genuinely hope-

that your AI model is not merely “working” but“thought through”;

that your experiment is not merely “giving results” but“verifiable”;

that your project aims at more than a medal, and leaves, for a student yet to come, a starting point worth walking from.

/ Competition Rules · 2026 Season /

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本期编辑｜李佩珊

内容审核｜靳学峰