bioservices

A Python interface to more than 40 biology databases and web services, including UniProt, KEGG, ChEMBL, and Reactome. It provides a consistent way to retrieve and connect biological information from different sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to retrieve protein and pathway information, search chemical databases, map identifiers between services, and run sequence or similarity searches.
Why use it?
It reduces the work of learning separate APIs and formats when a project needs data from several biological databases.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,000 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 $0.00073 $0.03000
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.01500
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00600
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00300

Measured yesterday against content hash 10fb427a789c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

bioservices 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 4 executable files (scripts/batch_id_converter.py, scripts/compound_cross_reference.py, scripts/pathway_analysis.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

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/bioservices/SKILL.md · 400 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 400 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

BioServices

Overview

BioServices is a Python package providing programmatic access to approximately 40 bioinformatics web services and databases. Retrieve biological data, perform cross-database queries, map identifiers, analyze sequences, and integrate multiple biological resources in Python workflows. The package handles both REST and SOAP/WSDL protocols transparently.

Version note: Examples target bioservices 1.16.0 (PyPI, Mar 2026). Requires Python 3.9–3.12. UniProt REST changes in mid-2022 (bioservices ≥1.10) mainly affect tabular columns names — see upstream _legacy_names if parsing breaks. ChEMBL wrappers changed at 1.6.0 (2018 API); use get_similarity, get_substructure, get_molecule instead of pre-1.6 method names.

When to Use This Skill

This skill should be used when:

  • Retrieving protein sequences, annotations, or structures from UniProt, PDB, Pfam
  • Analyzing metabolic pathways and gene functions via KEGG or Reactome
  • Searching compound databases (ChEBI, ChEMBL, PubChem) for chemical information
  • Converting identifiers between different biological databases (KEGG↔UniProt, compound IDs)
  • Running sequence similarity searches (BLAST, MUSCLE alignment)
  • Querying gene ontology terms (QuickGO, GO annotations)
  • Accessing protein-protein interaction data (PSICQUIC, IntactComplex)
  • Mining genomic data (BioMart, ArrayExpress, ENA)
  • Integrating data from multiple bioinformatics resources in a single workflow

Core Capabilities

1. Protein Analysis

Retrieve protein information, sequences, and functional annotations:

from bioservices import UniProt

u = UniProt(verbose=False)

# Search for protein by name
results = u.search("ZAP70_HUMAN", frmt="tab", columns="id,genes,organism")

# Retrieve FASTA sequence
sequence = u.retrieve("P43403", "fasta")

# Map identifiers between databases
kegg_ids = u.mapping(fr="UniProtKB_AC-ID", to="KEGG", query="P43403")

Key methods:

  • search(): Query UniProt with flexible search terms
  • retrieve(): Get protein entries in various formats (FASTA, XML, tab)
  • mapping(): Convert identifiers between databases

Read the full file on GitHub · 400 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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 · 400 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A 10fb427a789c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

bioservices is a skill published in the GitHub repository K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills (40,390 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 3,000 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.

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