Assemble Yourself

Assemble Yourself — an educational bioinformatics puzzle

You play a bioinformatician. A short stretch of bacterial DNA has been chopped by a sequencing machine into dozens of short, noisy fragments called reads — some misread, some from the opposite strand. Drag and flip the reads until they line up, watch the consensus DNA sequence emerge, then translate the six reading frames to uncover the secret protein hidden inside the gene.

It doubles as a gentle introduction to the central dogma, DNA base-pairing, codons, and next-generation sequencing, with a built-in tutorial. Teachers can bury any word in a gene and share a single link, or print a paper version. Available in six languages; runs entirely in your browser.

Printable table top version also available.