alterlab-monarch

alterlab-monarch is a skill for Claude Code from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 76 tokens per session (3,663 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A biomedical knowledge-graph lookup tool for the Monarch Initiative, which links diseases, genes, and observable traits across humans and model organisms.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find genes associated with a disease or phenotype, compare human and animal models, and look up HPO terms. HPO, or Human Phenotype Ontology, is a controlled vocabulary for describing clinical features.
Why use it?
It helps connect information spread across disease, genetics, clinical, and model-organism databases when investigating an uncommon disease or possible gene cause.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the alterlab-databases plugin — 39 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to find genes associated with a disease or phenotype, compare human and animal models, and look up HPO terms. HPO, or Human Phenotype Ontology, is a controlled vocabulary for describing clinical features.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-monarch
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 AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-monarch
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install alterlab-databases, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 39 skills.

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 alterlab-monarch

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-monarch/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-monarch)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-monarch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-monarch/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 alterlab-monarch

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-monarch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-monarch.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,663 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 medium

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 →

  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 213
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
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 $0.00076 $0.03663
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01832
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00733
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00366

Measured 5d ago against content hash 67a459f719a8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alterlab-monarch scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 5d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/query_monarch.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

allowed-tools: Read WebFetch Bash(curl:*) Bash(python:*)
skills/databases/alterlab-monarch/SKILL.md · 374 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 374 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Monarch Initiative Database

Overview

The Monarch Initiative (https://monarchinitiative.org/) is a multi-species integrated knowledgebase that links genes, diseases, and phenotypes across humans and model organisms. It integrates data from over 40 sources including OMIM, ORPHANET, HPO (Human Phenotype Ontology), ClinVar, MGI (Mouse Genome Informatics), ZFIN (Zebrafish), RGD (Rat), FlyBase, and WormBase.

Monarch enables:

  • Mapping phenotypes across species to identify candidate disease genes
  • Finding all genes associated with a disease or phenotype
  • Discovering model organisms for human diseases
  • Navigating the HPO hierarchy for phenotype ontology queries

Key resources:

Scripts

scripts/query_monarch.py — query the Monarch Initiative API v3 (stdlib only, JSON to stdout):

python scripts/query_monarch.py entity HP:0001250        # look up an entity (gene/disease/HPO)
python scripts/query_monarch.py search epilepsy          # text search the knowledge graph
python scripts/query_monarch.py associations HGNC:1100   # associations for an entity

When to Use This Skill

Use Monarch when:

  • Rare disease gene discovery: What genes are associated with my patient's phenotypes (HPO terms)?
  • Phenotype similarity: Are two diseases similar based on their phenotypic profiles?
  • Cross-species modeling: Are there mouse/zebrafish models for my disease of interest?
  • HPO term lookup: Retrieve HPO term names, definitions, and ontology hierarchy
  • Disease-phenotype mapping: List all HPO terms associated with a specific disease
  • Gene-phenotype associations: What phenotypes are caused by variants in a gene?
  • Ortholog-phenotype mapping: Use animal model phenotypes to infer human gene function

Read the full file on GitHub · 374 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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.

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. 5d ago First seen · 374 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 67a459f719a8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alterlab-monarch is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 3,663 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-05.

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