What is ncbi-blast-api?

A service for comparing DNA or protein sequences against biological databases to find similar sequences. BLAST, or Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, is commonly used to identify possible sequence matches and relationships.

Use it to run nucleotide or protein similarity searches, check their status, and retrieve the results from NCBI databases.

It avoids writing separate code for submitting searches, waiting for long-running results, and downloading the returned matches.

ncbi-blast-api — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by wentorai

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.

Any agent

npx skills add wentorai/research-plugins --skill ncbi-blast-api

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wentorai/research-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wentorai/research-plugins/ncbi-blast-api/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wentorai/research-plugins/ncbi-blast-api)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wentorai/research-plugins/ncbi-blast-api"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wentorai/research-plugins/ncbi-blast-api/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wentorai/research-plugins/ncbi-blast-api"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wentorai/research-plugins/ncbi-blast-api.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,823 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

medium Data Exfiltration · line 27
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.

How audits are shown

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00019	$0.01823
Opus 5	$0.00010	$0.00911
Sonnet 5	$0.00004	$0.00365
Haiku 4.5	$0.00002	$0.00182

Measured 6d ago against content hash e587203e0e58, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ncbi-blast-api scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 6d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -X POST "https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi" \

skills/domains/biomedical/ncbi-blast-api/SKILL.md · 196 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 196 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

NCBI BLAST REST API

Overview

BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is the most widely used bioinformatics tool, comparing nucleotide or protein sequences against databases to find regions of similarity. The NCBI BLAST REST API enables programmatic submission of searches, status polling, and result retrieval. Free, no authentication required (but rate-limited).

API Workflow

BLAST searches are asynchronous: submit → poll → retrieve.

Step 1: Submit Search

# Nucleotide BLAST (blastn)
curl -X POST "https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi" \
  -d "CMD=Put&PROGRAM=blastn&DATABASE=nt&QUERY=ATGCGATCGATCG..."

# Protein BLAST (blastp)
curl -X POST "https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi" \
  -d "CMD=Put&PROGRAM=blastp&DATABASE=nr&QUERY=MKTLLLTLVVVTIVCL..."

# BLAST with specific parameters
curl -X POST "https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi" \
  -d "CMD=Put&PROGRAM=blastn&DATABASE=nt&QUERY=SEQUENCE&\
EXPECT=0.001&WORD_SIZE=11&HITLIST_SIZE=50"

Step 2: Check Status

# Poll for completion (returns XML with Status field)
curl "https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&FORMAT_OBJECT=SearchInfo&RID=YOUR_RID"

Step 3: Retrieve Results

# Get results in XML
curl "https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&FORMAT_TYPE=XML&RID=YOUR_RID"

# Get results in JSON
curl "https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&FORMAT_TYPE=JSON2_S&RID=YOUR_RID"

# Get results in tabular format
curl "https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&FORMAT_TYPE=Tabular&RID=YOUR_RID"

BLAST Programs

Program	Query → Database	Use case
`blastn`	Nucleotide → Nucleotide	DNA/RNA similarity
`blastp`	Protein → Protein	Protein homology
`blastx`	Translated nuc → Protein	Find protein homologs of DNA
`tblastn`	Protein → Translated nuc	Find DNA encoding similar protein
`tblastx`	Translated nuc → Translated nuc	Compare at protein level

Read the full file on GitHub · 196 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.

6d ago First seen · 196 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A e587203e0e58

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ncbi-blast-api is a skill published in the GitHub repository wentorai/research-plugins (291 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 1,823 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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ncbi-blast-api