UmojaHack Tunisia: InstaDeep Kinase Classification Challenge by UmojaHack Africa This is a private hackathon open to UmojaHack Tunisia participants. If you are a university student in Tunisia and would like to participate, contact Zindi Ambassador Mohamed Salem Jedidi.
Protein kinases are enzymes that play a vital role in all eukaryotic cells (such as our own). They switch other proteins on and off by adding phosphate groups, which changes how those proteins behave by modifying properties such as flexibility or reactivity. Protein kinases can be classified by function into multiple classes within several main groups.
All enzymes, including protein kinases, are made of one or more chains of amino acids, which determine their structure, behaviour, and interaction with other enzymes and molecules. That means it should be possible to predict the protein kinase class given just the amino acid sequence - which is the goal of this hackathon. You must predict which class a sequence belongs to.
Since sequences in the same class all perform essentially the same function, usually through the same mechanism, they are likely to share certain defining characteristics. However, these kinases are thought to have evolved via multiple different pathways. Two sequences with the same function might have evolved separately and ended up with very different sequences, and two kinases might look similar due to a shared evolutionary history, but perform very different functions. This makes it harder to tell via simple comparison what function a given sequence will perform.
In addition to kinases from known organisms (which we have from studying their proteomes), there are vast numbers of metagenomic kinase sequences - this is proteomic sequence data from environmental samples. Being able to quickly annotate them with function using this model (i.e. going beyond simple sequence similarity) would be indispensable. Models developed in the course of this challenge may contribute to furthering the understanding of the world around us.