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 ucsc_conservation_and_tfbsgit 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/ucsc_conservation_and_tfbs)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/ucsc_conservation_and_tfbs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/ucsc_conservation_and_tfbs/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/ucsc_conservation_and_tfbs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/ucsc_conservation_and_tfbs.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 | $0.00076 | $0.01981 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00038 | $0.00991 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00015 | $0.00396 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00198 |
Grade A, and why
ucsc-conservation-and-tfbs 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 11d 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 — 185 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Conservation Scores & TFBS Lookup (UCSC)
This skill provides access to evolutionary constraint scores and conserved
elements from the UCSC Genome Browser. It retrieves scores from the PHAST
package — specifically phastCons (identifying functional blocks) and phyloP
(measuring individual site constraint) — calculated from multiple alignments.
Use this skill to determine if a non-coding variant hits a site that hasn't changed since a common ancestor (which is a strong signal for pathogenicity) or to find conservation peaks across a regulatory element.
Prerequisites
uv: Read theuvskill and follow its Setup instructions to ensureuvis installed and on PATH.- User Notification: If .licenses/ucsc_conservation_and_tfbs_LICENSE.txt does not already exist in the workspace root directory then (1) prominently notify the user to check the terms at https://genome.ucsc.edu/conditions.html and https://genome.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/help/api.html, then (2) create the file recording the notification text and timestamp.
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.
- Large Output Handling: Always pass --output to redirect output to a file. Parse it separately (using jq or your own code).
- Notification: If this skill is used, ensure this is mentioned in the output.
Utility Scripts
This skill includes scripts to query different types of genomic data from UCSC:
scripts/get_conservation.py: For Evolutionary Conservation scores (phyloP, phastCons).scripts/get_tfbs.py: For Transcription Factor Binding Sites (TFBS).scripts/list_tracks.py: For listing available tracks based on search or group constraints.
Always use the hg38 genome assembly by default, unless the user has specified
otherwise.
What ships with it
4 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.
- 11d ago First seen · 185 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A c416b214ae56
ucsc-conservation-and-tfbs is a skill published in the GitHub repository google-deepmind/science-skills (2,990 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 1,981 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
instrument-data-to-allotrope
Convert laboratory instrument output files (PDF, CSV, Excel, TXT) to Allotrope Simple Model (ASM) JSON format or flattened 2D CSV. Use this skill when scientists need to standardize instrument data for LIMS systems, data lakes, or downstream analysis. Supports auto-detection of instrument types. Outputs include full…
exploratory-data-analysis
Perform bounded, local exploratory analysis of explicitly supported scientific files. Use for redacted CSV/TSV/JSON profiles; optional NumPy, HDF5, FASTA/FASTQ, and basic image metadata inspection; missingness/leakage audits; outlier and transformation sensitivity; and rigorous EDA report scaffolds. Other domain…
matlab
Build, review, migrate, and safely plan MATLAB or GNU Octave numerical workflows, including arrays, tabular/time data, tests, projects, graphics, MAT files, and explicit Python interoperability.
phylogenetics
Build and analyze phylogenetic trees using MAFFT (multiple alignment), IQ-TREE 2 (maximum likelihood), and FastTree (fast NJ/ML). Visualize with ETE3 or FigTree. For evolutionary analysis, microbial genomics, viral phylodynamics, protein family analysis, and molecular clock studies.
research-engineer
An uncompromising Academic Research Engineer. Operates with absolute scientific rigor, objective criticism, and zero flair. Focuses on theoretical correctness, formal verification, and optimal implementation across any required technology.
mapping-to-snomed
Maps clinical concept spans extracted by OpenMed to SNOMED CT concepts through a USER-SUPPLIED terminology server (the user's own Ontoserver, Snowstorm, or UMLS/UTS), never a bundled vocabulary. Use when the user wants to code findings, disorders, procedures, body structures, or substances to SNOMED CT, run an ECL…