About Helicase

What Helicase is

Helicase is an independent educational website about biology. It has 8 interactive labs and simulations, guides to 15 fields of biology, a knowledge graph of 143 connected concepts and a research explorer for the published literature.

An independent educational project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by any university, journal, or government agency.

Explanations come at three reading levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. You can switch levels at any time in Settings. Helicase is free. It has no ads, no analytics and no tracking cookies, and nothing is sold.

Who runs it

Helicase is run by Easton Tobias. Questions, corrections and accessibility problems are welcome through the contact page.

How we choose and check sources

Every page ends with its sources, and claims link to them inline. The 276 sources behind the site are listed in the source library.

• Trusted sources only. We cite peer-reviewed journals, university-level textbooks, and pages from government and intergovernmental agencies such as the US National Library of Medicine, the National Human Genome Research Institute, NOAA and the World Health Organization.
• Every source is verified. Before a source is cited, its title, authors, year and identifiers are checked against PubMed, PubMed Central, Crossref, DataCite, NCBI Bookshelf or the publisher’s own page, and the date of that check is recorded. The checks can be re-run automatically.
• Numbers are checked against the source. Figures were compared with an abstract, a book chapter or an agency page before use. Constants in simulations that are illustrative are labeled as such.
• Our words, their evidence. Explanations are our own summaries. We link to originals instead of copying abstracts or figures. If anything here disagrees with the original source, the original wins.
• Nothing invented. We do not make up papers, people, statistics, quotations or links. When a source could not be confirmed, it was removed rather than cited.

What the source labels mean

Peer-reviewed

Published in a scholarly journal after review by independent experts.

Historical paper

A journal article from before 1975, when outside peer review was not yet standard. We do not claim a review status we have not verified.

Preprint, not peer-reviewed

Shared publicly before review. Findings may change.

Primary research

Reports new experiments or observations.

Review

Summarizes and weighs many earlier studies.

Government source

Published by a government agency, such as the US National Library of Medicine.

Educational

A textbook or reference written to teach.

How settled a claim is

EstablishedEmerging researchDebated

Most of biology’s textbook content is established. Where research is new, or where studies disagree, we say so with these labels, and we show the evidence on each side.

How AI was used

Helicase was built with help from an AI assistant, Anthropic’s Claude, which drafted code and text under the direction of the site’s owner.

• AI did not replace checking. Sources were looked up by their identifiers, such as PubMed IDs and DOIs, and confirmed against the databases above. Facts were compared with the cited sources, and sources that could not be confirmed were removed.
• No AI while you browse. There is no chatbot, no answer is generated for you, and nothing you type on Helicase is sent to an AI service.
• Mistakes are still possible. If something looks wrong, please tell us, ideally with the source that disagrees.

Limits

• Helicase is for learning. It is not medical, legal or safety advice.
• Simulations are simplified on purpose. They show how a system tends to behave, not what will happen in a real organism or ecosystem.
• Science moves. Scientific content and citations were last reviewed on October 8, 2026.

Read about accessibility, privacy and the terms of use.