2021

2021 is often assumed to be a blank year. It was not: the iGEM roster records a full fifteen-person team in the Software track, and the wiki was left as the unedited iGEM template, which is why the project vanished from the record. It was recovered in 2026 from a presentation given to BioZone in April 2021. The team was doing computational enzyme design for PET-degrading enzymes: building a probability distribution over plastic-degrading enzymes, expanding sequence space with ProteinSolver, running a Rosetta design pipeline, and closing a dry-lab/wet-lab active-learning loop with a Gaussian process trained on 25 million sequences. The deck cites the 2019 team’s BioBrick parts as prior work, which makes 2019 and 2021 one continuous line rather than two separate attempts. It is also the closest ancestor of the 2026 project. PetaBite is making structurally the same bet — machine-learning-guided discovery of better PETases — five years later and at a very different scale.

Project recovered in 2026 from a BioZone slide deck, not the wiki. The 2021 wiki remains the unedited iGEM template.

No awards are recorded for this year. See the note on the left for why that may be a gap in the record rather than a result.