Thanks for trying the game. In fact I was too busy with technical details to give too much thoughts about the game dynamics and playability. I had idea to go for pattern matches which would have made the order of nucleotides/letter in the sequence more relevant. Also wanted the player to have to buy the letters. But Game Jam means time crunch. Perhaps I will revisit this in the future.
Graphics are just done with ANSI codes, no curses necessary. This post (not mine) gives an overview: https://xn--rpa.cc/irl/term.html