Reverse engineers! Cryptographers! I have a fun challenge & contest for you. The BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccine contains copy-pasted RNA from the actual virus. The vaccine RNA encodes for (almost) the unmodified virus S protein. But, the RNA has been optimized somehow. But how? 1/
You can change RNA quite a lot without changing the protein that comes out. It is known that replacing RNA letters to G and C to the RNA enhances vaccine efficiency. And lo, the designers of the vaccine have done just that - GC content went from ~36% to ~57%: 2/ 
In the graph above, the red dots are vaccine changes that _lower_ the number of G and C though. And we don't know why they did that. In other places, it appears simpler rules have been used to optimize the RNA. The goal is now: can we reverse engineer the algorithm they used? 3/
So why would we even care? It turns out that the 'codon optimization' performed is crucial for vaccine performance. Or in general, it is crucial for mRNA synthesis, something that can lead to cancer treatments to. The world would love to know how this is done! 4/
On berthub.eu/articles/posts… you can find everything you need to start hacking away. The raw data is there, as well as a helpful @golang program to get started. 5/
In there you'll find a leader board of algorithms that transpose the viral RNA into vaccine RNA. There are currently two weak entries, so you could do a lot better easily! If you improve on github.com/berthubert/bnt… let me know and I'll put you on the table! /ends
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