What we do
Since our founding in 2023 we’ve developed a high-throughput nanopore sequencing workflow, simple tools to automate the validation process, taught hands-on classes in DNA extraction and amplification, and built a fungarium containing 600 specimens and counting. We’re working toward publication in peer-reviewed journals.
Our contributors come from a range of backgrounds, including communities that institutional science has historically excluded, and we organize our work to reflect that. Everything we build is open source, openly documented, and designed to be picked up and run by anyone.
We do this because we can, and because we believe that in order to be resilient, science needs more diversified and accessible frameworks. Community science is possible in a way it hasn’t been before. We’re here to find out how far it can go.
Built to be replicated
Generating quality specimen data is about more than just fieldwork. It requires rigorous, repeatable processes for collection, documentation, sequencing, and validation. We’re building the tooling and workflows to make that pipeline reproducible and open.
These aren’t mycology-specific solutions. The same infrastructure problems that limit community science in mycology exist across open biology. Our frameworks are designed to be extensible and reusable across domains.
We sit at the intersection of biology and software, using modern design and engineering practices to solve the data quality and accessibility problems that limit open science. The goal is infrastructure that any community biology project can pick up, adapt, and run with.
Science needs a more resilient model
Open science is a different architecture. When the tools are distributed and lightweight, the data is public, and the methods are documented in a way for anyone to follow, the work can continue regardless of what happens to any particular funding source or organization. It can be verified, extended, and built upon by anyone with the curiosity to try.
This is what durable science looks like. It’s our mission to help build this better infrastructure.