One platform, from bench to bioinformatics.

Real bioinformatics tools on a real genome, running in this tab. Nothing to install, nothing to pay, no account needed.

Sinorhizobium meliloti 1021Scroll to zoom, genome to codon

whole genome6.69 MbNCBI RefSeq GCF_000006965.1

Chromosome 3.65 Mb
pSymA 1.35 Mb
pSymB 1.68 Mb

One bacterium. Three separate DNA molecules, 6,691,694 bases between them, and the two big plasmids are why it can fertilise a field.

The real tools, compiled to WebAssembly and running on your machine

samtools
bcftools
seqtk
muscle
fasttree
Python
R

See every tool

Learn it by running it.

Every lesson is a real terminal on real data. Click the suggested command or type your own, read what the tool prints, and the lesson checks your work before it moves on.

Browse the lessons

The lesson terminal after running samtools view reads.sam: nine alignment records, then the next suggested command, samtools sort

Then do the work on the Bench.

Your own pages, with Python, R and the shell side by side and the results kept underneath. This one reads the real annotation of the genome above, 12,812 rows of it, without leaving the browser.

Open the Bench

The genome's annotation file, sinorhizobium.gff, open on a Bench page as a 12,812-row table: genes and coding sequences on NC_003047.1 with their start, end and strand

That genome lives on alfalfa roots.

Sinorhizobium meliloti settles inside small nodules on the roots of alfalfa and turns nitrogen from the air into a form the plant can use. Two of its three DNA molecules, the plasmids pSymA and pSymB, carry much of the machinery for that partnership.

A root nodule cut open under a microscope, its inside a soft pink — Cut open, an active nodule is pink: leghaemoglobin, keeping oxygen from the enzyme that fixes nitrogen. Photo: Ninjatacoshell, CC BY-SA 3.0

A petri dish on black with pale bacterial colonies streaked across it — Strain Rm1021 on a plate: the same strain whose genome you just scrolled through. Photo: Ninjatacoshell, CC BY-SA 3.0

Alfalfa roots on a black background, with pale round nodules along them — Alfalfa roots and their nodules. The white line drawing is succinoglycan, a sugar the bacterium makes to get into the root. Photo: Ninjatacoshell, CC BY-SA 3.0

Everything here is real.

An agarose gel glowing violet under ultraviolet light, with pink DNA bands in lanes — A real agarose gel under UV light. The genome window above is drawn in its colours. Photo: Mnolf, CC BY-SA 3.0

Real tools
samtools, bcftools and seqtk, compiled to WebAssembly, with Python and R beside them. They run on your machine, in this tab.
Nothing to install
Open a lesson and the terminal, the files and the data are already there. No setup, no server.
Free
Every lesson and every tool. It all runs on your own computer, so it costs us nothing to serve and it costs you nothing to use.

Teaching a course?

Build one in the browser without writing code, and keep it as a file you own.

Open the course editor

Your first lesson takes eight minutes.

Read a file and count its lines in a real terminal, and see why that is where the work starts.

Start the first lesson

lsList the files in a workspace
catRead a file's contents
wc -lCount its lines
*Run one command across many files