decoupler

A biology analysis tool that estimates the activity of transcription factors, pathways, and gene groups from omics data such as gene measurements. Omics data records biological measurements across cells, samples, or locations.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps analyze bulk, single-cell, and spatial data using AnnData, pandas tables, or raw matrices.
Why use it?
It turns feature measurements into scores for biological programs, so researchers can compare activity without calculating each program separately.

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/scverse/decoupler/data
Any agent
npx skills add scverse/decoupler --skill data
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/scverse/decoupler

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 220 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,789 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 $0.00220 $0.01789
Opus 5 $0.00110 $0.00894
Sonnet 5 $0.00044 $0.00358
Haiku 4.5 $0.00022 $0.00179

Measured yesterday against content hash adcc7f625de2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

decoupler 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.

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.

src/decoupler/_skills/data/SKILL.md · 86 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 86 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

decoupler

decoupler estimates biological activities (transcription factors, pathways, gene sets) from omics data. You give it a data matrix (observations × features, e.g. cells × genes) and a prior-knowledge network (which features belong to which biological program), and it returns an enrichment score per observation per program — all methods sharing one unified interface. Part of scverse; works directly on AnnData, pandas.DataFrame, or raw matrices.

This skill is a router. Each topic below has a detailed reference file with exact signatures and footguns. Read the relevant reference before writing code — do not rely on memory of the API, because results are written to different places depending on the input type and several methods have non-obvious defaults.

Two cross-cutting concepts (read these first if unsure)

  • The unified method call — every method is called the same way: dc.mt.<method>(data, net, tmin=5, ...). Covers the accepted input types (AnnData / DataFrame / [matrix, obs, var] list), the shared arguments (tmin, raw, layer, empty, bsize), and the big footguns: input must be normalized (e.g. log1p), not raw counts, and net must be a long-format source/target/weight table.

  • Where the results go — the return type depends on the input type. AnnData → written in place into .obsm["score_<method>"] (and .obsm["padj_<method>"] if the method tests), returns None. DataFrame / list → returns an (es, pv) tuple (pv is None for non-testing methods). Read scores back out of an AnnData with dc.pp.get_obsm. This is the #1 thing agents get wrong.

Task → reference file

If the task is… Read
starting from scratch — set up an end-to-end run (load data → get a net → score → rank → plot) references/getting-started.md
how to call a method, what data/net formats are accepted, tmin/raw/layer semantics references/calling-convention.md
where scores land and how to read them back (.obsm vs (es, pv) tuple, get_obsm) references/io-and-outputs.md
choosing and configuring a method — ulm/mlm/ora/gsea/gsva/aucell/viper/zscore/waggr/mdt/udt + their kwargs references/methods.md
getting prior knowledge — TF regulons (CollecTRI, DoRothEA), pathways (PROGENy), gene sets (MSigDB hallmarks), OmniPath, .gmt, organism translation references/priors.md
preprocessing — pseudobulk from single cell, expression/sample filtering, layers, spatial kNN references/preprocessing.md
running many methods at once and combining them into a consensus references/multi-method.md
ranking activity scores by group/ordering and plotting them (barplot, dotplot, volcano, network) or overlaying them on a UMAP / spatial H&E via scanpy references/ranking-and-plotting.md
benchmarking methods/nets against a perturbation ground truth references/benchmarking.md
using a bundled example dataset (dc.ds.*) — and whether its .X is raw counts or already normalized references/datasets.md

Read the full file on GitHub · 86 lines

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 · 86 lines · 220 tokens per session scan A adcc7f625de2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

decoupler is a skill published in the GitHub repository scverse/decoupler (292 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed BSD-3-Clause. It adds 220 tokens to every session and 1,789 once invoked, about $0.0011 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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