3 minute read 

NPL has entered a new partnership with The Align Foundation whose mission is to coordinate public research data by establishing computational benchmarks for reproducible, shareable and scalable datasets. NPL will provide metrology support to Align Foundation including experimental validation of benchmarks.  

The partnership extends into a trilateral collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who leads the development of large-scale, open-source datasets to help unlock the protein function problem – the quantitative prediction of protein function from sequence. Through a series of interlaboratory comparisons NIST and NPL will introduce measurement standards with reference datasets to enable prediction.  

NPL is home to the UK’s Reference Biofoundry, a facility designed to offer measurement support for application challenges in Engineering Biology (EngBio). The Reference Biofoundry develops reference materials, methods and standardised workflows thereby providing an invaluable infrastructure to industry and research organisations who strive to ensure reproducibility in research and translation from innovation to products.  

Through this collaboration, the Reference Biofoundry will deliver structured AI-ready datasets envisaged to enable cost-efficient and predictive approaches to engineer biological systems. The data that is structured and benchmarked against measurement standards can readily be shared to develop next-generation predictive models and is transferable across application challenges offering solutions to different sectors from healthcare to food, biofuels and high-value chemicals and materials.  

Max Ryadnov; Head of NPL’s Engineering Biology programme said: “We are excited about this partnership. Combining our expertise is what it takes to establish an open-source platform for reference datasets to help ensure research is reproducible, scalable, and sharable across research teams globally.” 

Pete Kelly, Head of Science, The Align Foundation commented: "Align was founded on the premise that biological data needs to be trustworthy enough for AI systems to build on. This partnership with NPL and NIST brings the measurement science required to make that possible, not only for our own datasets, but for the broader research community." 

David Ross, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), said: “There is an urgent need for data quality standards for AI-ready biological data. This collaboration, with contributions from the NIST Living Measurement Systems Foundry team, will advance the development of those standards for dataset generation, protocol development, and biofoundry operations.”