MutateIt — Protein Engineering Game

An interactive web game where players engineer proteins by introducing amino acid mutations, aiming to maximize predicted fitness. Live at: mutateit.biocentral.cloud

How it works

1. Select a protein from the library and enter a username.
2. Introduce mutations to the amino acid sequence.
3. The backend evaluates your sequence against a deep mutational scanning (DMS) model and returns a fitness score.
4. You have 20 turns — try to find the highest-scoring variant.
5. High scores are tracked per protein.

Repository structure

app/        Flutter web frontend
backend/    FastAPI backend (Python)
docker-compose.yml

Running locally

docker compose up --build

The frontend will be available at http://localhost and the backend API at http://localhost:8000.

Without Docker

Backend:

cd backend
uv run uvicorn main:app --reload
# or: ./run.sh

Frontend:

cd app
flutter run -d chrome

Deployment

Set the following environment variables before deploying:

Variable	Description	Default
API_BASE_URL	Backend URL used by the frontend build	http://localhost:8000
ALLOWED_ORIGINS	CORS allowed origins for the backend	*

License

See LICENSE.