NSF POSE: Phase II: Transitioning Rosetta Commons to a self-sustainable Open Source Ecosystem

This project is funded by the Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) Program which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. The Rosetta community has led the field of protein and RNA modeling and design with state-of-the-art biomolecular modeling and design software, high-impact scientific advances enabled by the software, and a workforce with best-in-class biomolecular engineering training.

The biomolecular modeling landscape is rapidly changing with the emergence of powerful machine learning methods, and the recent entry of several computationally designed proteins into clinical trials have marked an inflection point in the history of the field. These disruptions have prompted the Rosetta community to reimagine their practices to enable continued leadership and innovation in the next era of biomolecular modeling.

Specifically, Rosetta’s existing paid commercial license model limits Rosetta’s accessibility and impact, and de-incentivizes critical contributions from industry scientists. Second, Rosetta's remarkable success has led to dramatic expansion of both the software and community, yet the operational structure of the community has not been updated accordingly, limiting workforce growth, software development, and the diversity of perspectives that ultimately lead to higher-impact scientific advances.

This project will create opportunities for coordinated and strategic software development by leveraging, growing, and supporting the Rosetta community to provide best-in-class software. The project will serve the national interest by driving the next generation of the leading biomolecular modeling and design software that enables scientific discovery and innovation across the health, food, and energy sectors.

Our overall goal of this project is to transition the Rosetta Commons to an Open-Source Environment. Specifically, the team will (1) drive collaborative development, governance and adoption of new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in molecular modeling through open licenses; (2) develop standardized application programming interfaces (APIs), workflows, documentation standards, and tutorials to fuel the growth of the Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE), while maintaining desirable levels of software quality, security and accessibility; (3) provide support and maintenance for key infrastructure, (4) develop a new governance model to empower leaders in the community to ensure long-term sustainability and broad impact of the projects.

This work expands the Open Rosetta Ecosystem beyond the traditional Rosetta codebase, and it allows the community to create scientific breakthroughs through complex workflows with or without traditional Rosetta.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.