AlterLab Academic Skills

Zero-shot univariate time-series forecasting with Google's TimesFM foundation model, producing point forecasts and prediction intervals from CSV/DataFrame/array inputs, with a preflight system checker for RAM/GPU. Use to forecast any univariate series (sales, sensors, energy, vitals, weather) without training a custom model. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Query cBioPortal via its keyless REST API for cancer genomics across TCGA, GENIE, MSK-IMPACT and hundreds of studies — somatic mutations, copy-number alterations (GISTIC), mRNA/protein expression, structural variants, and patient-level clinical/survival data. Use when asked how often a gene is mutated/amplified/deleted in a tumor type, to profile oncogenes or tumor suppressors across cancers (pan-cancer alteration frequency), to pull patient-level mutations joined to OS/clinical outcomes, or to validate a cancer target from cohort genomics. For germline variant pathogenicity use alterlab-clinvar; for mutational-signature (SBS) decomposition use alterlab-cosmic; for CRISPR/RNAi gene-dependency use alterlab-depmap; for aggregated target-disease evidence use alterlab-opentargets. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Runs time series machine learning with the aeon library — classification, regression, clustering, forecasting, anomaly detection, segmentation, and similarity search via scikit-learn compatible APIs. Use when working with temporal data, sequential patterns, or time-indexed observations (univariate or multivariate) that need specialized algorithms beyond standard ML approaches. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Builds, simulates, and runs quantum circuits with Cirq, Google Quantum AI's framework for NISQ hardware, noise-aware low-level circuit design, and noise characterization. Use when targeting Google Quantum AI processors (Sycamore/Weber), designing noise-aware NISQ circuits, or running characterization experiments (randomized benchmarking, XEB). For IBM Quantum hardware and Qiskit Runtime prefer alterlab-qiskit; for gradient-trained quantum ML and hybrid quantum-classical models prefer alterlab-pennylane; for open-system Lindblad/master-equation dynamics prefer alterlab-qutip. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Builds INTERACTIVE charts with the Plotly Python library (plotly.express / graph_objects) — hover tooltips, zoom/pan, animations, rangesliders, 3D rotation, and standalone HTML/web-embeddable output. Use when a chart must be interactive or web-embedded, for dashboards (incl. Dash), exploratory data analysis, or rotatable 3D plots. For static publication figures defer to alterlab-matplotlib; for static statistical charts (heatmaps, distributions) defer to alterlab-seaborn; for diagrams/schematics defer to alterlab-scientific-viz. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Predict genome-wide functional genomics tracks from DNA sequence with Borzoi (Linder 2025) — a sequence-to-function model outputting RNA-seq, CAGE, ATAC, and ChIP coverage across long context, used to score non-coding and regulatory variant effects. Use when predicting functional tracks from a DNA sequence, scoring a non-coding/regulatory variant's effect on expression or chromatin, or doing in-silico mutagenesis of a locus. To LOOK UP a variant's population frequency prefer alterlab-gnomad; for its clinical significance prefer alterlab-clinvar; for protein-structure effects prefer alterlab-alphafold; for single-cell foundation models prefer alterlab-scgpt. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Parse and write FCS (Flow Cytometry Standard) files v2.0-3.1 with FlowIO — extract event data as NumPy arrays, read $-keyword metadata and channel/parameter definitions, and convert events to CSV or pandas DataFrame. Use when loading raw .fcs flow-cytometry files, inspecting channels and metadata, or preprocessing cytometry data for downstream gating and analysis. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Run full computational-pathology workflows with PathML — whole-slide-image (WSI) analysis across 160+ slide formats, multiplexed immunofluorescence (CODEX, Vectra, MERFISH), nucleus segmentation/classification (HoVer-Net, HACTNet), tissue- and cell-graph construction, HDF5 dataset management, and deep-learning model training on pathology data. Use when the user builds end-to-end deep-learning pathology pipelines, analyzes multiplexed or spatial-proteomics slides, or segments nuclei. For lightweight H&E slide preprocessing, tissue masking, or plain Random/Grid/Score tile extraction prefer alterlab-histolab instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Run the standard single-cell RNA-seq analysis pipeline with Scanpy on AnnData — QC filtering, normalization, dimensionality reduction (PCA, UMAP, t-SNE), Leiden/Louvain clustering, marker/differential expression, PAGA trajectories, and plotting. Use when analyzing scRNA-seq data through clustering, cell-type annotation, DE, or pseudotime workflows; for building or reading the .h5ad data structure itself (layers, obs/var, concatenation, backed mode) prefer alterlab-anndata instead, and for RNA velocity from spliced/unspliced counts prefer alterlab-scvelo instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Run RNA velocity analysis with scVelo on single-cell RNA-seq data — estimate cell-state transitions from spliced/unspliced mRNA dynamics, infer trajectory direction, compute latent time, and identify driver genes. Use when adding directionality to trajectories or studying differentiation dynamics from spliced/unspliced layers (velocyto/STARsolo output); for the general QC, clustering, UMAP, and differential-expression analysis pipeline prefer alterlab-scanpy instead, and for .h5ad data-structure I/O and layer wrangling prefer alterlab-anndata instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Loads Therapeutics Data Commons (TDC, PyTDC) AI-ready drug-discovery datasets and benchmarks — ADME, toxicity, drug-target interaction (DTI), scaffold splits, and molecular oracles for therapeutic ML and pharmacological prediction. Use when fetching a standardized benchmark dataset, applying scaffold or cold-split evaluation, or sourcing labeled molecules for ADMET, toxicity, or DTI modeling. Sources data, splits, and oracles only — defer molecular featurization (ECFP/fingerprints), model training, and transformers to a molecular-ML skill (e.g. deepchem). Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Provides the RDKit cheminformatics toolkit for low-level, fine-grained molecular primitives — SMILES/SDF parsing, descriptors (MW, LogP, TPSA), fingerprints, substructure/SMARTS search, 2D/3D coordinate generation, similarity, and reaction handling. Use when custom sanitization, specialized fingerprint or descriptor algorithms, reaction enumeration, or conformer generation demand direct API control; for a high-level pandas-friendly wrapper over RDKit prefer alterlab-datamol, and for turning molecules into ML feature vectors prefer alterlab-molfeat. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Drives the Rowan cloud quantum-chemistry platform via its Python API for computational chemistry — pKa prediction, geometry optimization, conformer searching, molecular property calculations, protein-ligand docking (AutoDock Vina), and AI protein cofolding (Chai-1, Boltz-1/2), with cloud compute and no local setup. Use when running DFT or semiempirical methods, neural network potentials (AIMNet2), molecular property or protein-ligand binding predictions, or automated computational chemistry pipelines. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Creates, analyzes, and visualizes complex networks and graphs in Python with NetworkX. Use when working with network/graph data structures, analyzing relationships between entities, computing graph algorithms (shortest paths, centrality, clustering), detecting communities, generating synthetic networks, or visualizing topologies — applicable to social, biological, transportation, citation, and any pairwise-relationship networks. This is classical graph analytics, not deep learning — for training graph neural networks (GCN/message passing, node/edge/graph classification on Cora-style data) use alterlab-torch-geometric instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Query Google Data Commons for public statistical data aggregated from global sources, resolving geographic entities and pulling time-series statistics. Use when working with demographic data, economic indicators, health statistics, or environmental data — population counts, GDP figures, unemployment rates, disease prevalence — or when resolving places to DCIDs and exploring relationships between statistical entities. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Query the Open Targets Platform GraphQL API for target-disease associations, tractability and safety data, genetics/omics evidence, and known drugs. Use when identifying or prioritizing therapeutic drug targets, assessing target druggability/safety, or gathering target-disease evidence for drug discovery. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Runs high-performance genomic interval analysis with gtars (databio), a Rust toolkit with Python bindings — the performance-critical backend for the geniml ML library. Use when computing overlaps/jaccard/coverage between BED region sets, indexing intervals with IGD, generating uniwig accumulation/coverage tracks, tokenizing genomic regions for ML, splitting single-cell fragments into pseudobulks, or computing GA4GH refget sequence digests. NOT for training region embeddings (use alterlab-geniml) or non-genomic spatial joins (use alterlab-geopandas). Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Runs Python code in the cloud with Modal — serverless containers, on-demand GPUs, and autoscaling. Use when deploying ML models, running batch processing jobs, scheduling compute-intensive tasks, or serving APIs that need GPU acceleration or dynamic scaling. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Simulates open quantum systems with QuTiP, the Quantum Toolbox in Python, solving Lindblad master equations (mesolve), Monte Carlo trajectories (mcsolve), and unitary dynamics (sesolve). Use when studying master-equation or Lindblad dynamics, decoherence, dissipation, quantum optics, cavity QED, or open-system time evolution. NOT for circuit-based quantum computing or hardware execution — for IBM Quantum circuits prefer alterlab-qiskit, for Google Quantum AI or NISQ circuits prefer alterlab-cirq, and for gradient-trained quantum ML prefer alterlab-pennylane. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Writes Markdown documents and text-based Mermaid diagrams (flowcharts, sequence, class, ER, gantt, state, and more) with full style guides, 24 diagram-type references, and 9 document templates. Use when authoring a scientific document, report, analysis, or README, or when a diagram should be expressed as version-controllable Mermaid/Markdown text rather than a rendered image. For AI-rendered publication schematics use scientific-schematics instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Builds statistical plots with the seaborn Python library and pandas DataFrame integration, on attractive matplotlib-based defaults. Use for quick exploration of distributions, relationships, and categorical comparisons — box plots, violin plots, swarm/strip plots, KDE/histograms, pair plots, joint plots, regression plots, correlation heatmaps, and faceted small multiples (relplot/displot/catplot/lmplot). For interactive/hover/zoom charts defer to alterlab-plotly; for exact journal/manuscript styling (column widths, point fonts, CMYK, vector export) defer to alterlab-scientific-viz; for low-level custom matplotlib figures defer to alterlab-matplotlib (seaborn integrates with it for fine-tuning). Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Build, slice, concatenate, read, and write AnnData annotated data matrices (obs, var, X, layers, obsm, uns) — the scverse data STRUCTURE, not an analysis pipeline. Use when creating or wrangling .h5ad/zarr files, managing cell and gene annotations, concatenating batches, or handling layers/obsm/backed-mode; for the QC, normalization, clustering, UMAP, and differential-expression analysis pipeline prefer alterlab-scanpy instead, and for RNA velocity from spliced/unspliced layers prefer alterlab-scvelo instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Build and analyze genome-scale constraint-based metabolic models with COBRApy — flux balance analysis (FBA), flux variability analysis (FVA), gene and reaction knockouts, flux sampling, and SBML model I/O. Use when simulating metabolic networks, predicting growth or knockout phenotypes, or running systems-biology and metabolic-engineering analyses on SBML genome-scale models. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Manage, annotate, and trace biological data with LaminDB, an open-source FAIR data framework that makes datasets queryable, versioned, and reproducible. Use when registering or querying biological datasets (scRNA-seq, spatial, flow cytometry), validating and curating data against ontologies (genes, cell types, diseases, tissues), tracking data lineage and computational workflows, building data lakehouses, or wiring integrations with Nextflow, Snakemake, W&B, or MLflow. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Verifies that every entry in a bibliography ACTUALLY EXISTS by cross-checking it against four keyless public scholarly APIs (Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, arXiv) with a polite mailto identifier, resolving DOI/arXiv IDs, fuzzy-matching title and authors (difflib SequenceMatcher ratio >=0.70), flagging retractions marked in Crossref (update-to) or OpenAlex (is_retracted), and emitting per-entry JSON verdicts mapped to the AlterLab citation-hallucination taxonomy (TF/PAC/IH/PH/SH). Accepts BibTeX, a DOI/arXiv ID list, or free-form references; degrades gracefully offline by emitting 'unverified' verdicts and never silently passing. Use when the request mentions verify citations, check references, fabricated or hallucinated references, fake DOI, retraction check, bibliography audit, or reference existence check. Does NOT write or draft papers — for authoring a manuscript (whose citation-check mode inserts citations) prefer alterlab-paper-writer instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Orchestrates the full academic research pipeline (research, write, integrity check, review, revise, re-review, re-revise, final integrity check, finalize), coordinating alterlab-deep-research, alterlab-paper-writer, and alterlab-paper-reviewer into a seamless 10-stage workflow with mandatory integrity verification, two-stage peer review, and reproducible quality gates. Use when the request mentions academic pipeline, research to paper, full paper workflow, paper pipeline, end-to-end paper, research-to-publication, or complete paper workflow. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Supervises theses and dissertations end to end — structure guidance from proposal through defense, chapter-by-chapter writing support (introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion), supervision strategies, committee management, defense and viva voce preparation, timeline planning, feedback integration, examiner-expectation guidance, and formatting (APA 7, Chicago, university styles). Use when the request mentions thesis, dissertation, supervision, defense preparation, viva, proposal defense, thesis structure, thesis chapter, literature review chapter, methodology chapter, results chapter, discussion chapter, thesis timeline, committee, thesis formatting, or dissertation proposal. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Scales reinforcement learning with PufferLib — high-throughput parallel training (PuffeRL), vectorized environments, and native multi-agent systems achieving 2-10x speedups over standard implementations. Use when scaling RL to millions of steps per second, running vectorized or multi-agent setups, building custom PufferEnv tasks, or integrating game environments (Atari, Procgen, NetHack, PettingZoo). For standard single-agent algorithm implementations (PPO/SAC/DQN) or quick prototyping prefer alterlab-stable-baselines3. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Access the AlphaFold DB of 200M+ AI-PREDICTED protein structures — retrieve models by UniProt accession, download PDB/mmCIF files, and analyze prediction confidence metrics (pLDDT, PAE). Use when a UniProt ID needs a computationally predicted 3D structure or when no experimental structure exists, for homology modeling, protein engineering, or structure-based drug discovery; for EXPERIMENTALLY determined structures (X-ray, cryo-EM, NMR) prefer alterlab-pdb, and for protein sequences, annotations, or accession ID mapping prefer alterlab-uniprot instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Machine learning on genomic interval data (BED files) with the geniml Python package — region embeddings (Region2Vec), joint region+metadata embeddings (BEDspace/StarSpace), single-cell ATAC-seq embeddings (scEmbed), consensus peak sets / universes (build-universe), tokenization, BEDshift randomization, and BBClient/BEDbase caching. Use when training or using region/cell embeddings, clustering scATAC-seq, building a tokenization universe from BED collections, or any ML/feature-learning task over genomic regions. NOT for plain interval arithmetic (overlap/intersect/merge counts) — that is gtars, not geniml. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Builds, transpiles, and runs quantum circuits with Qiskit, IBM's quantum computing framework, including Qiskit Runtime primitives (Sampler/Estimator), circuit transpilation, and error mitigation on IBM Quantum hardware. Use when targeting IBM Quantum backends, transpiling circuits, running Runtime sessions or batches, or applying resilience/error mitigation. For Google Quantum AI hardware and NISQ circuits prefer alterlab-cirq; for gradient-trained quantum ML and hybrid quantum-classical models prefer alterlab-pennylane; for open-system Lindblad/master-equation dynamics prefer alterlab-qutip. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Queries the FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) API for 800,000+ economic time series from 100+ sources, covering GDP, unemployment, inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, housing, and regional data. Use for macroeconomic analysis, financial research, policy studies, economic forecasting, fetching U.S. or international economic indicators by FRED series ID, and academic research requiring historical economic time series. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Manages microscopy image data on an OMERO server via the OMERO Python API (BlitzGateway) — access images, retrieve datasets, read pixel data, manage ROIs and annotations, and batch-process. Use when connecting to an OMERO server, pulling microscopy images or datasets, analyzing pixels, managing ROIs/annotations, or running high-content screening and microscopy workflows. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Infer gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from expression matrices using arboreto's scalable GRNBoost2 and GENIE3 tree-ensemble algorithms with Dask-distributed computation. Use when analyzing bulk or single-cell RNA-seq transcriptomics to map transcription-factor-to-target-gene regulatory interactions, build adjacency networks, or run the GRN-inference step of a SCENIC pipeline on large datasets. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Extract and preprocess tiles from whole-slide images (WSI) with histolab — OpenSlide-backed slide loading, tissue detection and masks, Random/Grid/Score tile extraction, and image/morphological filters for H&E preprocessing. Use when the user needs lightweight WSI slide preprocessing — building tile datasets for ML training, tissue segmentation, or quick tile-based inspection of histopathology slides. For end-to-end computational-pathology, deep-learning model training, nucleus segmentation, or multiplexed/spatial-proteomics (CODEX, Vectra) pipelines prefer alterlab-pathml instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Run differential gene expression analysis on bulk RNA-seq count matrices with PyDESeq2, the Python port of DESeq2 — size-factor normalization, dispersion estimation, Wald tests, FDR (Benjamini-Hochberg) correction, and volcano/MA plots. Use when identifying differentially expressed genes between conditions from raw bulk RNA-seq counts. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Build complete mass-spectrometry workflows with pyOpenMS — feature detection, peptide identification, protein quantification, and full LC-MS/MS pipelines across many MS file formats (mzML, mzXML) and algorithms. Use for comprehensive proteomics and MS data processing — for simple spectral comparison and metabolite identification use matchms. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Wraps RDKit in a high-level, pandas-friendly datamol interface with sensible defaults for everyday drug discovery — SMILES/SDF loading into DataFrames, molecule standardization, descriptors, fingerprints, Butina clustering, 3D conformer generation, scaffold analysis, and parallel batch processing, returning native rdkit.Chem.Mol objects. Use when running standard cheminformatics pipelines on molecule tables with minimal boilerplate; for low-level control, custom sanitization, or specialized algorithms prefer alterlab-rdkit. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Computes mass-spectral similarity and identifies compounds for metabolomics with matchms — comparing mass spectra, scoring similarity (cosine, modified cosine), and searching spectral libraries to annotate unknowns. Use when matching MS/MS spectra, identifying metabolites, or library searching; for full LC-MS/MS proteomics pipelines use pyopenms. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Applies medicinal-chemistry filters with the medchem library — drug-likeness rules (Lipinski, Veber), PAINS filters, structural alerts, and molecular complexity metrics for compound prioritization and library cleanup. Use when filtering or triaging a compound library, flagging PAINS or reactive groups, or assessing drug-likeness of candidate molecules. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Featurizes molecules for machine learning with molfeat (100+ featurizers) — ECFP/MACCS/MAP4 fingerprints, RDKit and Mordred physicochemical descriptors, and pretrained embeddings (ChemBERTa, ChemGPT, GIN) exposed as scikit-learn transformers that convert SMILES into feature vectors. Use when turning molecules into ML-ready feature matrices for QSAR/QSPR or virtual screening, or benchmarking fingerprint against descriptor and embedding representations; for training models and MoleculeNet benchmarks on those features prefer alterlab-deepchem, and for low-level fingerprint or descriptor primitives prefer alterlab-rdkit. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Queries the Precision Medicine Knowledge Graph (PrimeKG) for multiscale biomedical relationships across genes, drugs, diseases, phenotypes, pathways, and biological processes. Use when exploring drug-disease or gene-disease links, building disease-centric knowledge subgraphs, or sourcing relations for drug repurposing and precision-medicine analyses. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Submits and tracks protein-testing experiments on the Adaptyv Bio Foundry cloud lab (wet-lab validation), and optimizes protein sequences before submission with computational tools (NetSolP, SoluProt, SolubleMPNN, ESM). Use when designing proteins that need wet-lab validation - binding/affinity screening, expression testing, thermostability, or fluorescence assays - or when submitting experiments to the Foundry API, browsing the target catalog, tracking experiment status, retrieving results, or pre-screening sequences for solubility/expression. Triggers on "Adaptyv", "Foundry API", "cloud lab", "biolayer interferometry / BLI", "wet-lab validation". Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Processes astronomy and astrophysics data with the Astropy Python library — celestial coordinates, physical units, FITS files, cosmological calculations, time systems, tables, and world coordinate systems (WCS). Use when tasks involve coordinate transformations, unit conversions, FITS file manipulation, cosmological distance calculations, time scale conversions, or general astronomical data analysis. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Interact with Zotero reference management libraries using the pyzotero Python client — retrieve, create, update, and delete items, collections, tags, and attachments via the Zotero Web API v3. Use when working with Zotero libraries programmatically, managing bibliographic references, exporting citations, searching library contents, uploading PDF attachments, or building research automation workflows that integrate with Zotero. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Drives TÜBİTAK Açık Bilim Politikası (Open Science Policy) compliance and deposition into Aperta — TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM's national open archive at aperta.ulakbim.gov.tr — encoding the binding mandates (green-road deposit of the accepted manuscript on acceptance; open access within 6 months for fen/mühendislik (STEM) and 12 months for sosyal/beşeri (SSH); İlke-6 documentation when data must stay closed for KVKK/privacy reasons) and scaffolding a TÜBİTAK Veri Yönetim Planı / VYP (data management plan) at grant-application time. Use when depositing to Aperta, complying with the TÜBİTAK açık bilim policy, preparing a TÜBİTAK data management plan (VYP), reporting open-access compliance in a final report, or documenting a justified data embargo. For Zenodo/Dryad/OSF and international DMPs prefer alterlab-open-science; for the KVKK lawful-basis/anonymisation plan prefer alterlab-kvkk-dmp. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Verify publication figures with a render-then-check QA pass — data-fidelity against every underlying row, axis/label floor-and-ceiling legibility, bounding-box collision detection for overlapping text/markers, and 300-dpi print-readiness. Use when proofing or auditing a finished figure for correctness and print quality, catching mislabeled or overlapping elements, or confirming a plot faithfully represents its data before submission. For CREATING the plot prefer alterlab-matplotlib (or alterlab-seaborn / alterlab-plotly); for multi-panel publication layout prefer alterlab-scientific-viz; for schematic diagrams prefer alterlab-scientific-schematics. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Predict protein 3D structures with AlphaFold2 via ColabFold — MMseqs2-accelerated MSAs, monomer and AlphaFold2-Multimer complex folding, and confidence-based validation (pLDDT, pTM/ipTM, PAE). Use when folding a protein sequence or complex from FASTA, generating a predicted structure with confidence metrics, ranking models, or checking self-consistency of a design. For co-folding a protein WITH a small-molecule ligand or predicting binding affinity prefer alterlab-boltz; for antibody–antigen or one-FASTA multi-entity complexes prefer alterlab-chai; to LOOK UP an already-computed structure prefer alterlab-alphafold-db; for ESM embeddings or inverse folding prefer alterlab-esm. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Manipulate biological sequences, parse FASTA/GenBank/PDB files, run phylogenetics, and access NCBI/PubMed programmatically via Biopython (Bio.SeqIO, Bio.Entrez, Bio.PDB, Bio.Blast). Use when scripting custom bioinformatics pipelines, batch-processing sequence files, automating BLAST, or fetching records from Entrez — for quick one-off database lookups use gget, for unified multi-service integration use bioservices. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Query the CZ CELLxGENE Census (61M+ cells) programmatically via cellxgene-census and TileDB-SOMA, slicing expression by tissue, disease, or cell type and returning AnnData. Use when pulling reference single-cell RNA-seq data from the largest curated public atlas, running population-scale queries, or benchmarking your data against a reference — for analyzing your own dataset use scanpy or scvi-tools. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Process and visualize deep-sequencing coverage with the deepTools CLI — convert BAM to bigWig (bamCoverage), build log2 ratio tracks (bamCompare), run QC (multiBamSummary correlation, PCA, plotFingerprint), apply the ATAC-seq Tn5 shift (alignmentSieve --ATACshift), and make TSS/peak heatmaps and profiles (computeMatrix, plotHeatmap, plotProfile). Use for coverage tracks, signal heatmaps/profiles, normalization (RPGC/CPM/RPKM), and effective-genome-size lookups for ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, MNase-seq, or RNA-seq. NOT for per-read/CIGAR/MAPQ BAM record access — that is pysam. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Store and query genomic variant data at scale with TileDB-VCF — ingest VCF/BCF into compressed TileDB arrays, add samples incrementally, run fast parallel region/sample queries, and export back to VCF. Use when managing population-genomics variant datasets that are too large for flat VCF, building joint variant stores, or querying thousands of samples by region. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Runs molecular machine learning with DeepChem — diverse featurizers, pre-built MoleculeNet benchmark datasets, and pre-trained models (ChemBERTa, GROVER) for property prediction (ADMET, toxicity, solubility) via traditional ML or graph neural networks. Use when running end-to-end molecular ML experiments that need MoleculeNet benchmarks, scaffold splitting, or ready-made models with minimal setup; for building custom PyTorch graph architectures prefer alterlab-torchdrug, and for standalone molecule-to-feature-vector generation prefer alterlab-molfeat. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Predicts protein-ligand binding poses with DiffDock diffusion-based molecular docking from PDB structures and SMILES, producing pose confidence scores for virtual screening and structure-based drug design. Use when docking ligands into a protein, generating binding poses, or screening compounds against a target; not for binding affinity prediction. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Statistical modeling in Python with statsmodels — OLS, GLM, mixed models, and ARIMA with detailed diagnostics, residuals, and inference. Use when fitting specific model classes for econometrics, time series, or rigorous inference with coefficient tables and confidence intervals. For guided statistical test selection with APA reporting prefer statistical-analysis. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Query ClinicalTrials.gov via its API v2 to search trials by condition, drug, location, recruitment status, or phase and retrieve trial details by NCT ID. Use when finding interventional or observational studies, checking trial status and eligibility for patient matching, or exporting clinical trial records for research. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Runs computational fluid dynamics simulations with the FluidSim Python framework using pseudospectral FFT methods, with HPC support and output analysis. Use when simulating Navier-Stokes equations (2D/3D), shallow water equations, or stratified flows, or when analyzing turbulence, vortex dynamics, or geophysical flows. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Analyzes and manipulates materials with the pymatgen toolkit — crystal structures and molecules, phase diagrams and thermodynamic stability, electronic structure (band structures, DOS), surfaces and interfaces, and Materials Project database access. Use when working with crystal structures in materials science, converting between structure formats (CIF, POSCAR, XYZ), analyzing symmetry or space groups, computing phase diagrams, querying the Materials Project API, or handling VASP, Gaussian, or Quantum ESPRESSO output. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Searches TR Dizin (TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM national citation index) and verifies a journal's current national-index status through its confirmed unauthenticated REST/Elasticsearch API at https://search.trdizin.gov.tr/api/defaultSearch/{publication|journal|author|institution}/ (params q, order e.g. relevance-DESC, page), parsing hits.hits[]._source plus faceted aggregations, and derives indexing status from a journal record's isActive + journalYear coverage vs rejectYearList. Use when the user wants to search TR Dizin, check if a journal is TR Dizin indexed (TR Dizin'de var mı / taranıyor mu), find Turkish-indexed publications, verify national-index status before submitting, or audit doçentlik-eligible venues. For DergiPark hosting prefer alterlab-dergipark; for doçentlik points prefer alterlab-docentlik-eligibility; for teşvik scoring prefer alterlab-akademik-tesvik. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Searches YÖK Ulusal Tez Merkezi (tez.yok.gov.tr/UlusalTezMerkezi), Turkey's mandatory national graduate-thesis repository, for literature-review discovery and pre-proposal özgünlük (originality) checks. Drives the detailed search form (Tez Adı/Yazar/Danışman/Konu/Anahtar Kelime/Özet, tez türü, year range, language, İzinli/İzinsiz permission status) via the saidsurucu/yoktez-mcp tool, applies Turkish auto-stemming and ve/veya/içermesin boolean operators, runs paired Turkish+English queries, and emits Türkçe APA-7 thesis citations mapping Tez No to the published Yayın No. Use when the user wants to search Turkish theses, ara YÖK tez, check thesis novelty before approving a proposal, find dissertations by advisor (danışman) or university, dedupe a topic against existing tezler, or cite a YÖK thesis; respects the 2000-results-per-search cap and online-view-only access. For non-thesis Turkish journals use alterlab-dergipark or alterlab-trdizin. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.