Research prototype
NanoCanvas
Design DNA origami by describing it, not clicking through it
The problem
cadnano2 and its descendants are the standard way to lay out a DNA origami scaffold routing, but they're built for a human clicking through a 2D/3D editor one strand at a time. As LLM agents got good enough to reason about structural design, there was no way for one to actually drive a design tool — every existing tool assumed a mouse and a person.
What I built
NanoCanvas reimplements the cadnano2 design workflow with a modern stack — FastAPI backend, React front end, Three.js 3D view — but the key addition is a full REST API exposed via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), so an LLM agent can create, route, and modify a design programmatically with the same expressiveness a human has in the GUI.
That turns origami design into something an agent can iterate on: propose a routing, check it against design rules, adjust, and repeat — all without a human in the loop for every step.