Database Lookup (Claude Skill)

Search 78 public scientific, biomedical, materials science, and economic databases via REST APIs.

   
Type Claude Skill
Supplier K-Dense Inc. (community OSS)
Availability GA — part of the actively maintained K-Dense scientific-agent-skills collection
Pricing Free / OSS — license not stated upstream
Capabilities Read/Write — Claude runs the skill’s Python locally (Bash), not as an MCP tool

How to install

  • Claude Code / Claude.ai — Skills CLI (recommended): 
    npx skills add K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills

    Installs the K-Dense collection; enable the database-lookup skill when prompted. Works across Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex via the Agent Skills spec (requires Node ≥ 18).

  • Claude Code / Claude Desktop — manual clone: 
    git clone https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
cp -r scientific-agent-skills/skills/database-lookup ~/.claude/skills/

    Project-scoped alternative: copy into .claude/skills/ instead of ~/.claude/skills/. The skill declares its own Python dependencies in its SKILL.md; install them (the K-Dense skills generally use uv / pip) when prompted on first use.

What it does

Search 78 public scientific, biomedical, materials science, and economic databases via REST APIs. Covers physics/astronomy (NASA, NIST, SDSS, SIMBAD), earth/environment (USGS, NOAA, EPA), chemistry/drugs (PubChem, ChEMBL, DrugBank, FDA, KEGG, ZINC, BindingDB), materials (Materials Project, COD), biology/genomics (Reactome, UniProt, STRING, Ensembl, NCBI Gene, GEO, GTEx, PDB, AlphaFold, InterPro, BioGRID, Gene Ontology, dbSNP, gnomAD, ENCODE, Human Protein Atlas, Human Cell Atlas), disease/clinical (COSMIC, Open Targets, ClinicalTrials.gov, OMIM, ClinVar, GDC/TCGA, cBioPortal, DisGeNET, GWAS Catalog), regulatory (FDA, USPTO, SEC EDGAR), economics/finance (FRED, World Bank, US Treasury), demographics (US Census, Eurostat, WHO). Use when looking up compounds, genes, proteins, pathways, variants, clinical trials, patents, economic indicators, or any public database API query.

Primary use cases: looking up compounds, genes, proteins, pathways, variants, clinical trials, patents, economic indicators, or any public database API query.

Notes

Distributed as a SKILL.md (plus code examples) in the K-Dense collection — Claude executes it locally via Bash/Python rather than as an MCP server. Upstream license: not stated upstream. The skill name to enable after install is database-lookup.

Sources

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