alterlab-nf-core-sarek

alterlab-nf-core-sarek is a skill for Claude Code from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 283 tokens per session (2,586 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A bioinformatics workflow that turns short-read FASTQ files, which contain raw DNA sequencing reads, into VCF files listing detected genetic variants. It uses the nf-core/sarek pipeline for germline or tumor-related analysis.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for whole-genome or whole-exome germline analysis, somatic analysis, or tumor-normal comparisons. It can also resume processing from an intermediate step when alignment files already exist.
Why use it?
It removes the need to manually assemble and run each alignment, duplicate-marking, recalibration, and variant-calling step. The pinned pipeline version makes the workflow repeatable.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the alterlab-bioinformatics plugin — 38 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it for whole-genome or whole-exome germline analysis, somatic analysis, or tumor-normal comparisons. It can also resume processing from an intermediate step when alignment files already exist.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install alterlab-bioinformatics, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 38 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-nf-core-sarek

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-nf-core-sarek/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-nf-core-sarek)
Your own site
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agentmods 80×15 button for alterlab-nf-core-sarek

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-nf-core-sarek"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-nf-core-sarek.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 283 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,586 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00283 $0.02586
Opus 5 $0.00142 $0.01293
Sonnet 5 $0.00057 $0.00517
Haiku 4.5 $0.00028 $0.00259

Measured 12d ago against content hash fb464f2a233e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alterlab-nf-core-sarek 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/make_samplesheet.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.

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.

skills/bioinformatics/alterlab-nf-core-sarek/SKILL.md · 165 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 165 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

nf-core/sarek — FASTQ-to-VCF Variant Calling

The workflow-runner entry point for raw-reads-to-variants: drive the Nextflow nf-core/sarek pipeline (pinned -r 3.8.1) to take germline or somatic short-read FASTQ through alignment, GATK4 duplicate marking and base-quality recalibration, and SNV/indel calling, then hand the resulting VCFs to the suite's database and parsing skills for interpretation.

This skill is the command-line / workflow counterpart to the suite's Python-library bioinformatics skills. Use it for the raw-data-to-VCF leg; use the library skills (alterlab-pysam, alterlab-tiledbvcf) once you hold a VCF.

When to Use This Skill

Trigger this skill when the user wants to:

  • Go from FASTQ to VCF — call variants on whole-genome (WGS) or whole-exome (WES) short reads.
  • Run germline SNV/indel calling (one or many normal samples).
  • Run somatic / tumor-normal calling (matched tumor + normal, or tumor-only).
  • Use nf-core/sarek specifically, or want a reproducible "GATK best-practices alignment-to-VCF" pipeline without hand-writing every step.
  • Resume a run from an intermediate --step (already have BAM/CRAM, only need recalibration or variant calling).

Does NOT Trigger — route adjacent requests here

The request is really about… Route to
Parsing / filtering / reading an existing VCF/BAM in Python (pysam/htslib) alterlab-pysam
Storing / querying large multi-sample variant stores (TileDB-VCF arrays) alterlab-tiledbvcf
Clinical significance of a called variant (pathogenic/benign) alterlab-clinvar
Population allele frequencies for a called variant alterlab-gnomad
Somatic mutation catalogue / cancer census lookup alterlab-cosmic
RNA-seq transcript/gene quantification (salmon/kallisto), not DNA variants alterlab-rnaseq-quant
16S/ITS amplicon / microbiome FASTQ → feature table alterlab-qiime2-amplicon
Sequence homology / similarity search (BLAST+, DIAMOND) alterlab-blast
Spatial transcriptomics neighborhood/SVG analysis alterlab-squidpy-spatial
Differential expression stats from counts alterlab-pydeseq2

Read the full file on GitHub · 165 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 12d ago First seen · 165 lines · 283 tokens per session scan A fb464f2a233e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alterlab-nf-core-sarek is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 283 tokens to every session and 2,586 once invoked, about $0.0014 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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