GTEx Expression Database (Claude Skill)

Retrieve quantitative tissue-level RNA expression and expression-QTL data from the GTEx (Genotype-Tissue Expression) Project across 54 non-diseased human tissues.

   
Type Claude Skill
Supplier Google DeepMind
Availability GA
Pricing Free / OSS skill (Apache-2.0 code, CC-BY-4.0 docs); GTEx Portal API is public, no key
Capabilities Read-only — Claude runs the skill’s Python locally (uv run) against the GTEx Portal API
Verified degraded · 2026-07-20 — dir resolves; fixed a stale scienceskillscommon copy line
Security cleared · 2026-07-20 — provenance matches google-deepmind, Apache-2.0, maintained, keyless public API, no OSV advisories

How to install

The google-deepmind/science-skills collection follows the Agent Skills SKILL.md spec. The repo’s primary npx skills add path targets Gemini/Antigravity; for Claude the followable path is a manual copy of the skill directory.

  • Claude Code / Claude Desktop — clone and copy the skill into your skills directory: 
    git clone https://github.com/google-deepmind/science-skills
cp -r science-skills/skills/gtex_database ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r science-skills/skills/uv ~/.claude/skills/

    (The SKILL.md requires the bundled uv skill for its setup — copy it too.)

  • Prerequisite — the skill runs its scripts/gtex_cli.py via uv run; install uv first if absent: curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh. Python deps install into an isolated environment on first run.

What it does

Queries the GTEx Portal API V2 for transcriptomics across 54 tissue sites:

  • Gene symbol → GENCODE ID mapping
  • Median TPM expression retrieval across tissues
  • Top-tissue identification by expression level
  • eQTL discovery for a specific gene
  • Regional eQTL queries within a chromosomal window

Primary use cases: tissue-specific expression lookup, eQTL annotation of variants, prioritizing candidate regulatory variants by tissue.

Notes

Claude Science: This resource is offered inside Anthropic’s Claude Science via the Expression featured connector. Its inclusion there is an independent signal of quality and trustworthiness for life-science research.

No API key required, but users must acknowledge the GTEx Portal license terms before first use; built-in rate limiting is enforced by the wrapper scripts. Covers non-diseased adult tissues and mRNA abundance only — not protein expression. The npx skills add google-deepmind/science-skills/ command documented upstream is oriented at Gemini/Antigravity (it writes to ~/.gemini/config/skills/); for Claude, the manual copy into ~/.claude/skills/ shown above is the equivalent path.

Sources

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