WEEK 20 · GATE 20: PAPER 2 ON ARXIV, ENDORSED (L4-ENDORSED)
Do one thing. Then you are ahead.
Halfway. Stop and look back down the mountain. Twenty weeks ago you had a cockpit and a headline. Today you submit your second preprint with a scientist's endorsement, you propose a talk, and you plan Half 2. Two mock sessions close the act: on Tuesday a principal investigator grills you in a simulated lab meeting; on Thursday a staff ML scientist interviews you. They are rehearsals, like a pilot's check ride before…
If you only do one thing this week: the submission
Yang, Wu & Arnold (2019), "Machine-learning-guided directed evolution for protein engineering"
Saturday sandbox
Yang, Wu & Arnold (2019), "Machine-learning-guided directed evolution for protein engineering", Nature Methods 16:687-694. The classic review; read it before week 21
By Sunday you should be able to say: “I am an author of two preprints, one endorsed. I can present both without notes to a biologist and to an ML scientist." --- ## PART 7 · Weeks 21-40 as chapters (depth, co-author, money) Same weekly shape as Part 6. Study tracks become lighter because the build blocks now carry Paper 3, the instruments and the money thread. --- # ACT V · The protein detective finds a partner (weeks 21-24) > Act V story. A detective can read fingerprints faster than anyone, but a fingerprint match is not a conviction. The case closes only when a forensic lab runs the test. Protein language models are your fingerprint reader: they turn each enzyme sequence into an "embedding" that carries hints about how it behaves, including how much heat it tolerates. Your job in Act V is to become a careful detective (honest baselines, no leakage between protein families, intervals) and, above all, to find the forensic lab: a founder-scientist who will express and test your top candidates. When they agree, their name goes next to yours. That is L4 co-authored, the moment you stop being a vendor. > > Format note for weeks 21-40. v5 Part 7 gave these weeks as one table row each. Each chapter below expands that row into the v5 weekly format (Goal · Study · Build · Output · Only one thing) without changing the gate or the output. The original row is quoted first”