EPFL Protein Design Week GDF-8 / myostatin latent-complex binders

Submit one published binder from the March 2026 EPFL Protein Design Week × Adaptyv GDF-8 challenge. Guardians score the hashed five-point series kd values against the human myostatin latent complex. They do not run the series.

EPFL Protein Design Week (Designing Life with AI, March 2026) asked participants to design binders to latent GDF-8 / myostatin (UniProt O14793). Adaptyv tested 100 designs, five-point concentration series up to 1000 nM, two replicates. Six bound. Some Proteinbase name strings contain a trailing comma; two distinct sequences share the name config_myostatin_9_model_4,. Match by sequence, never by name alone.

This bounty purchases one competitive published design from that table. It does not purchase a new wet-lab campaign.

Definitions And Scope

A candidate is the amino acid string in binder.fasta. A match is the unique Proteinbase row with that exact sequence. Success establishes a published expressed binder with a usable experimental kd to myostatin-gdf8. It does not establish a new physical sample.

Required Outputs And Format

binder.fasta: one > header, then amino acids. Ignore the header. Strip ASCII whitespace. Nonempty. Only ACDEFGHIKLMNPQRSTVWY.

methods.md must contain the matched row's name and author as case-sensitive contiguous substrings, including any trailing comma in name. If designMethod is nonempty, it must appear as a contiguous substring. It must contain this exact sentence, including the period:

No new laboratory binding series was performed for this Submission.

Package rules:

• archive format: none; one flat directory;
• only binder.fasta and methods.md.

Access And Known Limitations

Guardians fetch the CSV and check SHA-256 of the raw bytes, including a UTF-8 BOM if present, with no decode before hashing. Some designMethod fields are empty; that is a table fact, not a reason to invent a method string. Missing access or a hash mismatch blocks judgment.

Parse the hashed bytes as follows. Decode as UTF-8-SIG (BOM stripped for parse only). Then read records with Python 3 csv.reader using the excel dialect and no other options: delimiter is the ASCII comma ,; quote character is "; doublequote is true so a literal " inside a quoted field is encoded as ""; skipinitialspace is false; quoting is csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL. Do not split on commas with a regex, semicolon, or tab.

The first record is the header row. Header cells are the cell text after CSV unquoting. Required header names, each exactly once and in this order: id, name, sequence, author, designMethod, evaluations. Extra columns after those six are ignored. Missing, reordered, or duplicate required headers: the snapshot cannot be used and judgment is blocked.

Every later record is one data row. Map cells to headers by name. If csv.reader raises csv.Error, or a record has fewer fields than the header, skip that record; it is not a data row and cannot match. Extra fields beyond the header are ignored.

The evaluations cell after CSV unquoting is a Unicode string. Decode it with Python 3 json.loads. If json.loads raises json.JSONDecodeError, TypeError, or ValueError, or the result is not a JSON array (Python list), that row has no evaluations objects.

• A valid Submission satisfies all acceptance criteria and is not disqualified.
• Lowest geometric-mean kd wins. Binary64 ties go to the lowercase Solver address that sorts first.
• If no Submission is valid, the outcome is no_valid_submission.

• required artifacts missing after successful retrieval and decryption;
• the decrypted directory contains any filename other than binder.fasta and methods.md.

UTF-8 decode failure, FASTA parse failure, or Markdown that cannot be read as UTF-8 text fails the corresponding Pass/Fail check. There is no separate “corrupt artifact” disqualification.

Guardians must not rank by boltz2_ipsae or other computational scores. methods.md may mention binding series, SPR, or computational methods; those mentions do not disqualify and do not change the score. Guardians still score only the hashed myostatin-gdf8 kd set. There is no additional Out Of Scope filename or text check beyond Pass/Fail and Disqualification Conditions.

Allowed Resources And Reuse

Published challenge designs, including rows whose author is adaptyv-bio, may be submitted. Disclose name exactly.

Judge only submitted artifacts, this page, and the listed CSV. Do not run SPR.

Evaluation Procedure And Limits

1. Fetch gdf8_collection.csv and check SHA-256.
2. Open binder.fasta and methods.md.
3. Apply Pass/Fail Checks. Match by sequence, not name.
4. Geometric-mean myostatin-gdf8 kd.
5. Apply the winner rule.

One pass over 100 rows is enough.