Seanome is a nonprofit focused research organization building open-source computational tools to decode the genetic potential of the ocean's "forgotten 99%" of marine biodiversity. Its flagship tool, Kmerseek, accelerates protein function prediction roughly 1000x by enabling comparisons across vastly different species, with initial applications targeting Arctic clams that naturally resist neurotoxins. The organization aims to democratize access to nature's molecular solutions for health, longevity, synthetic biology, and climate resilience.
Funding
Funding not disclosed
Founders
Product
Problem
Over 99% of proteins on Earth have unknown functions, and traditional computational methods struggle to compare proteins across vastly different species due to evolutionary distance. This limits scientists' ability to discover nature's solutions to human problems—such as disease resistance, longevity, or climate adaptation—from the unexplored majority of marine biodiversity.
Solution
Seanome builds scalable, open-source software tools to annotate proteins of unknown function and bridge the evolutionary gap between marine and human genomes. Its flagship tool, Kmerseek, uses novel computational methods that speed up analysis approximately 1000x, enabling protein similarity detection that other tools cannot achieve across divergent species. The organization also develops nf-core/proteinannotator, a best-in-class protein annotation pipeline that aggregates multiple methods like DIAMOND-blastp, InterProScan, HMMer, and FoldSeek in a "wisdom of crowds" approach. Seanome is initially applying these tools to Arctic clams, which have solved human-relevant problems including longevity (living hundreds of years), tissue regeneration, and resistance to chronic nerve pain disease.
Target Audience
Primary users are computational biologists, bioinformaticians, and life science researchers working on marine genomics, protein function prediction, and biodiversity cataloging projects, as well as organizations involved in large-scale sequencing initiatives.
Features
- Kmerseek: a blazing-fast protein function predictor using novel computational methods for ~1000x faster cross-species analysis
- nf-core/proteinannotator: an open-source pipeline integrating multiple annotation methods including DIAMOND-blastp, InterProScan, HMMer, and FoldSeek
- Open-source availability of all tools to democratize access and maximize scientific innovation
- Application to Arctic clam genomics for studying natural neurotoxin tolerance, lifespan extension, and shell regeneration
- Scalable infrastructure designed for large-scale biodiversity sequencing projects
- Tools applicable across health, longevity, synthetic biology, and climate resilience research domains