Named After a Jellyfish
Cyanea takes its name from Cyanea capillata, the lion’s mane jellyfish — one of the largest known organisms, with tentacles spanning over 30 meters. Like its namesake, Cyanea the platform is designed to extend its reach across a vast network while remaining a single, coherent organism.
What We’re Building
Cyanea is an open-source, federated platform for bioinformatics. Think of it as what you’d get if HuggingFace, protocols.io, and Galaxy had an open-source baby built with modern tools.
The platform lets researchers share datasets, publish protocols, and run tools in the browser — all connected through a federated network where each institution can host its own instance while remaining part of a larger community.
How It’s Built
The platform runs on Elixir (Phoenix/LiveView) for the web layer and real-time collaboration, with a Rust crate ecosystem for high-performance bioinformatics computation. Browser-based tools are powered by WebAssembly, so they run at near-native speed without uploading data to any server.
- 13 Rust crates for sequence analysis, alignment, I/O, and more
- Elixir/Phoenix for the federated platform layer
- WebAssembly for client-side bioinformatics tools (Spaces)
- ActivityPub for cross-instance federation
Our Values
Open by default. Code, data, and protocols are shared openly. The platform itself is open source under a permissive license.
Federated, not centralized. Your data stays on your servers. You choose what to share and with whom. No vendor lock-in.
Community-driven. Built by and for the bioinformatics community. Contributions are welcome — from bug reports to new crates.
Performance matters. Rust and WebAssembly aren’t just buzzwords. They’re the right tools for processing gigabytes of genomic data efficiently.