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.
npx skills add AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-blastgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-SkillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-blast)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-blast"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-blast/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-blast"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-blast.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00216 | $0.02691 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00108 | $0.01345 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00043 | $0.00538 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00022 | $0.00269 |
Grade A, and why
alterlab-blast scanned grade A with 0 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 10d 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.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 175 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
BLAST+ — Command-Line Sequence Search
Run local NCBI BLAST+ 2.17.0 searches end-to-end: build a database with
makeblastdb, search it with blastn / blastp / blastx / tblastn, emit
machine-parseable tabular output, and scope by taxonomy. For very large protein
searches, hand off to DIAMOND blastp --ultra-sensitive (100x–10,000x the
speed of BLAST, per the DIAMOND project). This is the CLI / local-database
skill; it is deliberately distinct from the Biopython web API and the gget
one-liner (see routing table below).
Bulk DB builds and large searches are CPU/IO-heavy and fully offline — good candidates to run on local compute rather than burning API calls.
When to Use This Skill
Use this skill when the request involves any of:
- "BLAST these sequences", "run blastn/blastp/blastx/tblastn", "command-line BLAST"
- "build a local BLAST database", "makeblastdb", "index this FASTA for BLAST"
- "search my reads against a local nt/nr database", "get tabular BLAST hits I can parse"
- "scope the BLAST search to a taxon" (
-taxids/-negative_taxids) - "BLAST is too slow on millions of proteins" → DIAMOND
blastp - retrieving sequences out of a BLAST DB (
blastdbcmd, requires-parse_seqids)
Does NOT Trigger
Route adjacent requests to the right sibling skill instead of forcing BLAST+:
| The request is really about… | Route to |
|---|---|
The web BLAST API (Bio.Blast.NCBIWWW.qblast), or scripting BLAST inside a Python pipeline with Bio.Blast parsing |
alterlab-biopython |
A quick one-liner BLAST/database lookup (gget blast, gene/structure/enrichment lookups) |
alterlab-gget |
| Unified programmatic access to many bio web services (UniProt, KEGG, Ensembl REST, NCBI eUtils) | alterlab-bioservices |
| Building/searching a phylogenetic tree from sequences, not a similarity search | alterlab-phylogenetics |
| Read alignment to a reference genome (BWA/minimap2 → BAM) and SAM/BAM handling | alterlab-pysam |
| FASTQ→VCF variant calling pipeline | alterlab-nf-core-sarek |
| Transcript-level RNA-seq quantification (salmon/kallisto) | alterlab-rnaseq-quant |
| 16S/ITS amplicon classification (QIIME 2) | alterlab-qiime2-amplicon |
| Protein structure prediction / embeddings (ESM, AlphaFold) | alterlab-esm |
What ships with it
4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 10d ago First seen · 175 lines · 216 tokens per session scan A bba88cfb99bc
alterlab-blast is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 216 tokens to every session and 2,691 once invoked, about $0.0011 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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