Meet-U 2018 was implemented at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), Univ Paris-Sud - Univ Paris-Saclay and Université Paris-Diderot, all from Paris area, in France.

Subject: The topic of the course is in structural bioinformatics, more specifically protein-protein docking. The students have to conceive, design, develop, test and validate a computational program to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein complex, given the structures of the two monomeric partners.

Question: Given two proteins A and B, whose 3D structures are known, what is the 3D conformation of the A-B complex?

Expected product: Docking unfolds in two steps: (i) sampling of the conformational space (docking) and (ii) evaluation of the candidate conformations (scoring). Each team is in charge of one of the two steps. Teams pair up halfway through the project to integrate the two steps into a final complete executable. The program has to be handled with a documentation.

Referent teachers: J.-C. Gelly for Univ. Paris-Diderot, E. Laine for UPMC, A. Lopes for UPSUD-UPSaclay.

Jury members : A. Bonvin (Utrecht University), F. Cazals (Inria, Sophia Antipolis), F. Fraternali (King's College London), S. Grudinin (Inria, Grenoble) and D. Ritchie (Inria, Nancy).

Challenge-Colloquium day: It will take place on the 10th of January 2018, in Paris.