public-db-lookup

public-db-lookup is a skill for Claude Code from fmschulz/omics-skills. It costs 65 tokens per session (1,367 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A lookup tool for fetching small JSON records from public life-science databases such as UniProt and NCBI. It retrieves entries about genes, proteins, organisms, sequences, and structures.

In plain words
What is it for?
Looking up an accession number, organism, protein, sequence, structure, or related database entry from supported services.
Why use it?
It avoids writing separate web requests for each database and keeps responses small enough to inspect. It also handles temporary request failures and can save the full response when needed.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the omics-skills plugin — 34 skills, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Looking up an accession number, organism, protein, sequence, structure, or related database entry from supported services.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/public-db-lookup
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 fmschulz/omics-skills --skill public-db-lookup
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fmschulz/omics-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install omics-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 34 skills, 4 agents.

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 public-db-lookup

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/public-db-lookup/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/public-db-lookup)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/public-db-lookup"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/public-db-lookup/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 public-db-lookup

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/public-db-lookup"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/public-db-lookup.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,367 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.
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 $0.00065 $0.01367
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00683
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00273
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00137

Measured 4d ago against content hash 46f158eacac0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

public-db-lookup 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/lookup.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/public-db-lookup/SKILL.md · 91 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 91 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Public Database Lookup

One bounded GET against a public life-science REST API. The bundled script picks the base URL, adds a User-Agent, retries on 429 and 5xx, and prints a compact JSON envelope instead of the full payload.

Instructions

  1. Pick the service that owns the record: uniprot, ncbi-entrez, ncbi-datasets, mgnify, interpro, alphafold, string, or ena.
  2. Read the card for that service in references/services.md for the path, parameters, and the right --record-path.
  3. Run the wrapper:
    • In this repository: skills/public-db-lookup/scripts/lookup
    • After installation: ~/.agents/skills/public-db-lookup/scripts/lookup
  4. Keep --max-items small (default 5). Raise it only when the user needs more rows.
  5. When the full payload matters, add --save-raw PATH and work from the file; the envelope still carries the compacted view.
  6. For the two NCBI services, export NCBI_API_KEY and NCBI_EMAIL (and NCBI_TOOL if you have one). The script adds them as request parameters and redacts the key from its output.
  7. Requests are paced across invocations, not just within one, so calling the CLI in a loop stays inside each service's documented rate. The timestamps live under $XDG_STATE_HOME/omics-skills/public-db-lookup; override with --state-dir. Never pass a credential in --path or --param: the script refuses it, because it would be echoed back in the emitted URL and land in shell history.
  8. Route PubMed and PMC literature searches to /polars-dovmed; this skill does not cover them.

Execution behavior

  • Summarize the JSON envelope in Markdown by default.
  • Return raw JSON only when the user asks for machine-readable output.
  • When the payload is large, use --save-raw and report the path instead of pasting the content.
  • Re-run the lookup rather than trust tool output from earlier in a long conversation.

Quick Reference

Flag Meaning
--service NAME One of the eight services (required)
--path PATH Endpoint path relative to the service base URL, or a full URL under that base (required)
--param KEY=VALUE Query parameter; repeat as needed
--record-path a.b.c Dotted path to the record list; inferred from common keys when omitted
--max-items N Records, list items, and dict keys kept per level (default 5)
--max-depth N Nesting depth kept before containers collapse (default 3)
--format auto|json|text Parse as JSON, or keep the first 800 characters of text (default auto)
--save-raw PATH Write the full response body to PATH
--timeout SEC Request timeout (default 30)

Read the full file on GitHub · 91 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. 4d ago Changed · +1 lines 46f158eacac0
  2. 11d ago First seen · 90 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A 320715bba321

Subscribe to this mod's changes

public-db-lookup is a skill published in the GitHub repository fmschulz/omics-skills (7 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 1,367 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

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