foldseek

foldseek is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills. It costs 90 tokens per session (1,321 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool for searching protein structures by their three-dimensional shape. It compares an input structure with databases such as the Protein Data Bank and AlphaFold Database, which contain experimentally determined or predicted structures.

In plain words
What is it for?
Searching structure databases, finding structural homologs, querying with PDB files, and clustering proteins by three-dimensional similarity.
Why use it?
It finds structurally similar proteins even when their amino-acid sequences are not obviously alike. This supports searches for remote relatives and groups of proteins with related shapes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Searching structure databases, finding structural homologs, querying with PDB files, and clustering proteins by three-dimensional similarity.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills/foldseek
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills --skill foldseek
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for foldseek

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills/foldseek/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills/foldseek)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills/foldseek"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills/foldseek/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for foldseek

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills/foldseek"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills/foldseek.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,321 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 2 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Output Handling · line 60
    Model output is used without validation or sanitization. Unvalidated output injected into downstream contexts (SQL, shell, HTML) enables injection attacks and arbitrary code execution.
    Fix: Validate and sanitize all model output before using it in downstream contexts. Use parameterized queries for SQL, shell quoting for commands, and HTML encoding for web output.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00090 $0.01321
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.00660
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00264
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00132

Measured 11d ago against content hash 3503be2b0cc1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

foldseek scanned grade A with 2 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -X POST "https://search.foldseek.com/api/ticket" \

Runs shell commandslowCapability

Expected in a hook, worth knowing in a rule or an instructions file.

subprocess.run([
skills/foldseek/SKILL.md · 176 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 176 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prerequisites

Requirement Minimum Recommended
Python 3.8+ 3.10
RAM 8GB 16GB
Disk 10GB 50GB (for local databases)

How to run

Note: Foldseek can run locally or via web server. No GPU required.

Option 1: Web Server (Quick; rate-limited, use sparingly)

# Upload structure to web server
curl -X POST "https://search.foldseek.com/api/ticket" \
  -F "[email protected]" \
  -F "database[]=afdb50" \
  -F "database[]=pdb100"

Option 2: Local installation

# Install Foldseek
conda install -c conda-forge -c bioconda foldseek

# Search PDB
foldseek easy-search query.pdb /path/to/pdb100 results.m8 tmp/

# Search AlphaFold DB
foldseek easy-search query.pdb /path/to/afdb50 results.m8 tmp/

Option 3: Python API

import subprocess
import pandas as pd

def foldseek_search(query_pdb, database, output="results.m8"):
    """Run Foldseek search."""
    subprocess.run([
        "foldseek", "easy-search",
        query_pdb, database, output, "tmp/",
        "--format-output", "query,target,pident,alnlen,evalue,bits"
    ])
    return pd.read_csv(output, sep="\t",
                       names=["query", "target", "pident", "alnlen", "evalue", "bits"])

Key parameters

Parameter Default Description
--min-seq-id 0.0 Minimum sequence identity
-e 0.001 E-value threshold
--alignment-type 2 0=3Di, 1=TM, 2=3Di+AA
--max-seqs 1000 Max hits to pass through prefilter; reducing this affects sensitivity

Databases

Database Description Size
pdb100 PDB chains ~340K structures
afdb50 AlphaFold DB clustered at 50% sequence identity ~53M structures
swissprot SwissProt structures ~540K structures
cath50 CATH domains ~50K domains

Output format

# results.m8 (tabular)
query   target          pident  alnlen  evalue  bits
query   1abc_A          85.2    120     1e-45   180.5
query   2def_B          72.1    115     1e-32   145.2

Read the full file on GitHub · 176 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 176 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A 3503be2b0cc1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

foldseek is a skill published in the GitHub repository adaptyvbio/protein-design-skills (158 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 1,321 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 2 findings (makes network calls, runs shell commands). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

foldseek

Structure similarity search with Foldseek. Use this skill when: (1) Finding similar structures in PDB/AFDB databases, (2) Structural homology search, (3) Database queries by 3D structure, (4) Finding remote homologs not detected by sequence, (5) Clustering structures by similarity. For sequence similarity, use uniprot…

zongtingwei/Bioclaw_Skills_Hub · 101 tokens

foldseek

Structure similarity search with Foldseek. Use this skill when: (1) Finding similar structures in PDB/AFDB databases, (2) Structural homology search, (3) Database queries by 3D structure, (4) Finding remote homologs not detected by sequence, (5) Clustering structures by similarity. For sequence similarity, use uniprot…

BioTender-max/awesome-bio-agent-skills · 90 tokens

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Structure similarity search with Foldseek. Use this skill when: (1) Finding similar structures in PDB/AFDB databases, (2) Structural homology search, (3) Database queries by 3D structure, (4) Finding remote homologs not detected by sequence, (5) Clustering structures by similarity. For sequence similarity, use uniprot…

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pdb

Fetch and analyze protein structures from RCSB PDB. Use this skill when: (1) Need to download a structure by PDB ID, (2) Search for similar structures, (3) Prepare target for binder design, (4) Extract specific chains or domains, (5) Get structure metadata. For sequence lookup, use uniprot. For binder design workflow…

zongtingwei/Bioclaw_Skills_Hub · 86 tokens

pdb

Fetch and analyze protein structures from RCSB PDB. Use this skill when: (1) Need to download a structure by PDB ID, (2) Search for similar structures, (3) Prepare target for binder design, (4) Extract specific chains or domains, (5) Get structure metadata. For sequence lookup, use uniprot. For binder design workflow…

BioTender-max/awesome-bio-agent-skills · 84 tokens

structure-search

Structure-based similarity search and scaffold analysis for drug discovery. Use for lead hopping, scaffold morphing, and chemical space exploration. Keywords: similarity search, scaffold hopping, chemical space, fingerprint, Tanimoto.

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