Science Skills is a collection of add-ons that give AI agents structured instructions, scripts, and references for scientific research, including genomics, structural biology, cheminformatics, and literature search. Researchers use it to guide agents through specialized scientific tasks with information from databases and tools such as AlphaGenome, AFDB, and UniProt. The catalogue entries are individual skills from this collection.
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.
npx skills add google-deepmind/science-skills --skill ensembl_databasegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/google-deepmind/science-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/ensembl_database)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/ensembl_database"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/ensembl_database/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/ensembl_database"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/ensembl_database.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00063 | $0.02289 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00025 | $0.00916 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00013 | $0.00458 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00229 |
Grade A, and why
ensembl-database 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 1mo ago.
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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Ensembl Database: ID Mapping and Genomic Features
Prerequisites
uv: Read theuvskill and follow its Setup instructions to ensureuvis installed and on PATH.- User Notification: If .licenses/ensembl_database_LICENSE.txt does not already exist in the workspace root directory then (1) prominently notify the user to check the terms at https://useast.ensembl.org/index.html and https://github.com/Ensembl/ensembl-rest/wiki, then (2) create the file recording the notification text and timestamp.
Overview
The Ensembl database is a resource for genome annotation. This skill allows you to interact with the Ensembl REST API to resolve ambiguous symbols, cross-reference IDs (RefSeq, HGNC, UniProt, ENSG), fetch raw sequences, and retrieve detailed transcript structures.
Key Concepts:
- ENSG (Gene): Stable identifier for a human gene. Other species will have different three-letter species codes.
- ENST (Transcript): Stable identifier for a transcript (splicing isoform).
- ENSP (Protein): Stable identifier for a translated protein.
- MANE Select: The consensus primary transcript agreed upon by Ensembl and NCBI.
- Canonical: Ensembl's representative transcript (used if MANE is not available or non-human).
Core Rules
- Use the Wrapper: ALWAYS execute the provided helper scripts to query the database rather than accessing the database directly. The scripts automatically enforce the required rate limit gracefully.
- Default Species: If the species is absent or ambiguous in the prompt,
default to
"human". You MUST explicitly flag this default to the user to ensure they are aware. - Primary Transcripts: When listing transcripts for a gene, only return the MANE Select transcript (for human) or the Canonical transcript (for others) unless the user explicitly asks for all alternative isoforms. You MUST flag to the user when multiple transcripts are available and you are defaulting to the primary one.
- Assembly Handling: The default assembly is GRCh38. For GRCh37 requests,
you MUST use the
--assembly GRCh37flag. You MUST explicitly flag to the user when a non-default assembly is being used. - Output Location: The script writes full JSON/FASTA output to temporary
files in
/tmpby default, or to a user-specified file using the--outputflag. It also prints a concise summary to stdout. - Notification: If this skill is used, ensure this is mentioned in the output.
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.
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 203 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A aff4c6f7c862
ensembl-database is a skill published in the GitHub repository google-deepmind/science-skills (3,315 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 2,289 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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