arboreto

A Python library that estimates gene regulatory networks from gene-expression data. A gene regulatory network describes which transcription factors may influence which target genes based on expression patterns.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyze bulk or single-cell RNA data with GRNBoost2 or GENIE3 and produce transcription-factor, target-gene, and importance results, including distributed runs.
Why use it?
It helps researchers infer likely regulatory relationships without manually checking every possible transcription-factor and gene pair.

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/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/arboreto
Any agent
npx skills add K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills --skill arboreto
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 66 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,106 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 $0.00066 $0.02106
Opus 5 $0.00033 $0.01053
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00421
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00211

Measured yesterday against content hash afeff219264e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

arboreto 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 yesterday.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/basic_grn_inference.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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

  • arboreto — 100% identical, 4 lines differ
  • arboreto — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
  • arboreto — 100% identical, 4 lines differ
skills/arboreto/SKILL.md · 268 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 268 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Arboreto

Overview

Arboreto is a Python library from Aerts Lab for inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression data. It parallelizes tree-based ensemble regression (GRNBoost2, GENIE3) with Dask across local cores or remote clusters.

Core capability: Identify which transcription factors (TFs) regulate which target genes based on expression patterns across observations (cells, samples, conditions).

Upstream: PyPI 0.1.6 (2021-02-09, latest). Docs: arboreto.readthedocs.io. Primary downstream consumer: pySCENIC.

Quick Start

Install arboreto:

uv pip install arboreto

Basic GRN inference:

import pandas as pd
from arboreto.algo import grnboost2

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Load expression data (genes as columns)
    expression_matrix = pd.read_csv('expression_data.tsv', sep='\t')

    # Infer regulatory network
    network = grnboost2(expression_data=expression_matrix)

    # Save results (TF, target, importance)
    network.to_csv('network.tsv', sep='\t', index=False, header=False)

Critical: Always use if __name__ == '__main__': guard because Dask spawns new processes.

Core Capabilities

1. Basic GRN Inference

For standard GRN inference workflows including:

  • Input data preparation (Pandas DataFrame or NumPy array)
  • Running inference with GRNBoost2 or GENIE3
  • Filtering by transcription factors
  • Output format and interpretation

See: references/basic_inference.md

Use the ready-to-run script: scripts/basic_grn_inference.py for standard inference tasks:

python scripts/basic_grn_inference.py expression_data.tsv output_network.tsv --tf-file tfs.txt --seed 777 --limit 5000

2. Algorithm Selection

Arboreto provides two algorithms:

GRNBoost2 (Recommended):

  • Fast gradient boosting-based inference
  • Optimized for large datasets (10k+ observations)
  • Default choice for most analyses

Read the full file on GitHub · 268 lines

Files

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.

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. yesterday First seen · 268 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A afeff219264e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

arboreto is a skill published in the GitHub repository K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills (40,390 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 2,106 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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