alterlab-qiime2-amplicon

alterlab-qiime2-amplicon is a skill for Claude Code from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 266 tokens per session (3,661 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command-line workflow for analyzing 16S or ITS amplicon sequencing data, which uses selected DNA regions to study the microorganisms in a sample. It uses QIIME 2 to turn raw sequencing reads into feature tables, taxonomic assignments, and diversity results.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to import paired-end FASTQ files, remove primers, denoise reads with DADA2, assign taxonomy, create microbial feature tables, and calculate community diversity.
Why use it?
It organizes the main processing steps and records the workflow's history, helping avoid errors such as denoising reads before removing primer sequences.

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 to import paired-end FASTQ files, remove primers, denoise reads with DADA2, assign taxonomy, create microbial feature tables, and calculate community diversity.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-qiime2-amplicon
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-qiime2-amplicon
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-qiime2-amplicon

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-qiime2-amplicon/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-qiime2-amplicon)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-qiime2-amplicon"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-qiime2-amplicon/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-qiime2-amplicon

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-qiime2-amplicon"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-qiime2-amplicon.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 266 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,661 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 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 Output Handling · line 156
    Output size or generation rate is not bounded. Unbounded output enables denial-of-service through resource exhaustion, log flooding, or context-window stuffing.
    Fix: Set explicit limits on output length, generation count, and rate. Use max_tokens and truncation to prevent unbounded 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 $0.00266 $0.03661
Opus 5 $0.00133 $0.01831
Sonnet 5 $0.00053 $0.00732
Haiku 4.5 $0.00027 $0.00366

Measured 12d ago against content hash 40e49d883f3e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alterlab-qiime2-amplicon 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 2 executable files (scripts/check_artifact.py, scripts/make_manifest.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-qiime2-amplicon/SKILL.md · 256 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 256 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

QIIME 2 Amplicon — 16S/ITS Microbiome Pipeline (FASTQ → Feature Table → Taxonomy → Diversity)

The command-line, workflow-runner entry point for marker-gene (amplicon) microbiome analysis. Given raw demultiplexed paired-end reads, it walks the canonical QIIME 2 order — import → primer trim → denoise → classify → diversity — and teaches the two things people get wrong most: trimming primers BEFORE DADA2, and the .qza/.qzv provenance model. It is the raw-data-to-result pipeline that hands a feature table off to in-memory analysis skills (see routing below).

Pinned to QIIME 2 2026.1 (the amplicon distribution). Forward-compat note: the distribution is renamed qiime2 in 2026.4 — the env name and channel URL change, the plugin commands below do not.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when the request involves running an amplicon / microbiome pipeline from sequencing reads:

  • "Run a QIIME 2 16S pipeline on my paired-end reads."
  • "I have ITS amplicon FASTQs — denoise with DADA2 and assign taxonomy."
  • "Build a feature table / ASV table and classify against SILVA."
  • "Pick truncation lengths from my quality plot and run core-metrics diversity."
  • "How do I trim primers before DADA2 in QIIME 2?"
  • "What's the right order of QIIME 2 commands?"

Does NOT Trigger — route these elsewhere

The request is really about… Route to
Alpha/beta diversity, UniFrac, PCoA ordination, PERMANOVA on an already-exported feature/distance table (in-memory, Python) alterlab-scikit-bio
Building / manipulating a phylogenetic tree, tree visualization, or comparative phylogenetics outside QIIME 2 alterlab-phylogenetics / alterlab-etetoolkit
Shotgun metagenomics taxonomic profiling, MAG assembly, functional genes (not marker-gene amplicons) not in this skill — amplicon only; flag the gap
RNA-seq transcript quantification (salmon/kallisto), differential expression alterlab-rnaseq-quantalterlab-pydeseq2
Variant calling FASTQ → VCF (germline/somatic) alterlab-nf-core-sarek
Protein/nucleotide sequence similarity search (BLAST+/DIAMOND) alterlab-blast
Spatial transcriptomics neighborhood/enrichment analysis alterlab-squidpy-spatial
Quick one-off gene/sequence/database lookups alterlab-gget
Reading/writing BAM/SAM/VCF, alignment file surgery alterlab-pysam

Read the full file on GitHub · 256 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. 12d ago First seen · 256 lines · 266 tokens per session scan A 40e49d883f3e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alterlab-qiime2-amplicon is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 266 tokens to every session and 3,661 once invoked, about $0.0013 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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