Guides

The tour: getting the workbench open, making a first project, and how the pieces fit together.

Written 2026-08-09. Read them in this order if you have never opened the app; skip to Workflows if you have a job to do rather than a tool to learn.

1. Install and open — there is no install. The length is spent on the part that matters: the folder on your disk is the source of truth and the browser's storage is a rebuildable cache, so "clear site data" costs one folder re-pick and never your work.
2. Your first project — five minutes on a real 4,361 bp plasmid, from a lobby starter through a digest to an export, with a number you can check by hand.
3. The workbench tour — the canvas, the tab strip, both rails, the menu bar, the palette, the console and the status line that reports on whatever you have open — and how context moves both ways between a tool and the canvas.
4. Files and formats — the 47 formats across 87 extensions, what each one keeps or drops, and the five cases that will not open at all.
5. Fetching a record — starting from an accession, a half-remembered name or a chromosome coordinate instead of a file: which archive answers which question, how to take a window rather than a whole chromosome, and why the length printed beside a whole-genome project accession is a contig count, not base pairs.

Per-tool pages live in the ledger; this section is what a reader needs before those make sense.

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WorkflowsCopy Anchor Link

Workflows — "I want to do X, what is the route?" — is the section that answers a real question end to end, across several tools.

• Clone an insert into a vector, and prove it worked — linearize → assemble → predict the gel → verify by Sanger → keep the provenance.

Five more are planned and listed there.