The Challenge
Sequence alignment traditionally requires sending massive string datasets to a Python or C++ backend, waiting for processing, and returning the result. This causes latency and high server costs.
The Approach
I utilized WebAssembly (Wasm) to compile the core alignment algorithms (Needleman-Wunsch) so they could run directly in the user's browser.
The Impact
By offloading computation to the client, the application became infinitely scalable with zero backend costs, providing real-time feedback to researchers as they typed sequences.