string-database

A connector for the STRING database, a scientific resource that records known and predicted interactions between proteins. It can query protein interactions, functional enrichment, and similar proteins, but requires the species or NCBI Taxon ID first.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find interaction partners, inspect evidence and confidence scores, identify enriched functions or pathways, and compare proteins by homology.
Why use it?
It avoids manually searching STRING and reduces the risk of querying the wrong organism. It also handles the required mapping from protein names or identifiers to STRING entries.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/string_database
Any agent
npx skills add google-deepmind/science-skills --skill string_database
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/google-deepmind/science-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 687 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00050 $0.00687
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.00344
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00137
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00069

Measured 2d ago against content hash 6de0f5994327, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

string-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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/string_cli.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/string_database/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

STRING Database Skill

This skill allows you to query the STRING database programmatically using a bundled Python CLI wrapper.

Prerequisites

  1. uv: Read the uv skill and follow its Setup instructions to ensure uv is installed and on PATH.
  2. User Notification: If .licenses/string_database_LICENSE.txt does not already exist in the workspace root directory then (1) prominently notify the user to check the terms at https://string-db.org/cgi/access, then (2) create the file recording the notification text and timestamp.

Core Rules

  1. MANDATORY: Ask for Species First: The STRING API requires NCBI Taxon IDs. You MUST NOT guess or assume a species. If the user does not explicitly state a species or Taxon ID, you MUST stop and ask: "Which species are you interested in? I need the NCBI Taxon ID to proceed." Even for well-known proteins like TP53, BRCA1, or MDM2 that are commonly associated with human studies, you MUST still ask — do not default to Human.
  2. Never print output to stdout: The --output <file.tsv> is required. Never read large outputs into context. Instead use jq, python or file operations (grep, head) to process large output.
  3. Map Identifiers first: If you only have common gene names (e.g., 'TP53'), map them to STRING IDs first as this guarantees much faster server responses. Use the map command for this.
  4. Notification: If this skill is used, ensure this is mentioned in the output.

Tool Execution

The CLI is at scripts/string_cli.py and should be run using uv run:

uv run scripts/string_cli.py <command> [options] --output /tmp/out.tsv

Feature Domains (Progressive Disclosure)

Read the following reference files based on the user's request:

  • Mapping Identifiers - Map common protein names to STRING IDs.
  • Interactions & Network - Find interacting proteins, network topologies, mediators, homology, and visual network images.
  • Enrichment & Functional Annotations - Analyze pathway enrichment (GO, KEGG, Pfam), PPI significance, or find all proteins associated with a specific term (e.g. Melanoma).
  • Values/Ranks Enrichment - Submit full experimental datasets (e.g., logFC, p-values) for rank-based enrichment analysis using the async background API.

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 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. 2d ago First seen · 67 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A 6de0f5994327

Subscribe to this mod's changes

string-database is a skill published in the GitHub repository google-deepmind/science-skills (2,814 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 687 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 2026-08-30.

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