alterlab-pubchem

alterlab-pubchem is a skill for Claude Code from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 89 tokens per session (1,140 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A connection to PubChem, a free public database of chemical compounds and their biological activity. It searches by chemical name, structure notation, formula, or compound identifier.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps retrieve molecular properties and bioactivity, find similar or matching substructures, convert names and structures, and screen groups of compounds.
Why use it?
It avoids manually searching chemical records and converting between identifiers or calculating basic compound properties.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

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

Good fit It helps retrieve molecular properties and bioactivity, find similar or matching substructures, convert names and structures, and screen groups of compounds.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-pubchem
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-pubchem
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-pubchem

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-pubchem"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-pubchem.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 89 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,140 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 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 $0.00089 $0.01140
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00570
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00228
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00114

Measured 6d ago against content hash 27d584427588, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alterlab-pubchem 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 6d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/bioactivity_query.py, scripts/compound_search.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-pubchem/SKILL.md · 99 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 99 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PubChem Database

Overview

PubChem is the world's largest freely available chemical database with 110M+ compounds and 270M+ bioactivities. Query chemical structures by name, CID, or SMILES, retrieve molecular properties, perform similarity and substructure searches, and access bioactivity data using the PUG-REST API and PubChemPy.

When to Use This Skill

This skill should be used when:

  • Searching for chemical compounds by name, structure (SMILES/InChI), or molecular formula
  • Retrieving molecular properties (MW, LogP, TPSA, hydrogen bonding descriptors)
  • Performing similarity searches to find structurally related compounds
  • Conducting substructure searches for specific chemical motifs
  • Accessing bioactivity data from screening assays
  • Converting between chemical identifier formats (CID, SMILES, InChI)
  • Batch processing multiple compounds for drug-likeness screening or property analysis

Core Capabilities

PubChem access is organized into nine capability areas. Copy-ready snippets for each live in references/capabilities.md.

  1. Chemical structure search — by name, CID, SMILES, InChI, or molecular formula.
  2. Property retrieval — single, specific-list, or batch molecular properties.
  3. Similarity search — Tanimoto similarity with threshold/MaxRecords.
  4. Substructure search — find compounds containing a structural motif.
  5. Format conversion — CID/SMILES/InChI/InChIKey and structure-file download.
  6. Structure visualization — 2D PNG images via PubChemPy or direct URL.
  7. Synonym retrieval — all known names for a compound.
  8. Bioactivity data access — assay summaries via PUG-REST and helper script.
  9. Comprehensive annotations — full PUG-View records (properties, drug info, safety, toxicity).

Core Workflow

The canonical entry point resolves an identifier to a compound, then reads properties:

import pubchempy as pcp

compound = pcp.get_compounds('aspirin', 'name')[0]
print(compound.cid, compound.molecular_formula, compound.molecular_weight)
print(compound.smiles, compound.xlogp, compound.tpsa)

Read the full file on GitHub · 99 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 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. 6d ago First seen · 99 lines · 89 tokens per session scan A 27d584427588

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alterlab-pubchem is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 89 tokens to every session and 1,140 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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