For me, I think the puzzles had a bit too many parts early on. There's the assembly of parts, the time limit and visually parsing the DNA "lines", it all became a bit overwhelming. It's possible a bit more time to get acquainted with each thing might help? I'm not at all sure what the fix is (if anything!), you'll know that much better than me!
Maybe there could be a tutorial without a timer to help onboarding. And the difficulty level could also rise a bit slower maybe. But the main difficulty probably comes from understanding the 3D shape of the DNA which can be really difficult on it's own. Also, I don't think that could be very easily removed without completely changing the game to something else.
Well, in any case, I won't probably be editing the game a lot afterwards. It was nice project but luckily only for the jam. As the difficulty is now this probably would not success very well as a real game even with all the possible bug fixes and polishing. But I'm happy with it being this kind of mini game. Not every game needs to be perfect.
Thanks again for your comments and feedback! It is always interesting to hear how others perceive games that I have been part of creating.