life-science

I need to analyze omics, cellular, or biomedical data

Cover single-cell, bulk RNA-seq, pathway enrichment, biomedical records, and public biological databases, connecting domain tooling to publishable results.

Who it helps

Wet-lab and dry-lab teamsSingle-cell or transcriptomics researchersClinical and biomedical data analysts

Bring these materials

FASTQ, counts, h5ad, or gene listsSample groups and batch metadataHypotheses or disease contextTarget figures or markers

Skills used

sa.scanpysa.scvi-toolssa.bulk-rnaseqsa.pathway-enrichmentsa.cellxgene-census

Before you start

Install the Skills for this workflow

Choose your system and agent, then run the command in your terminal. After installation, send the prompts below to your agent.

System
Agent
curl -sSL https://paperskills.com/scripts/paperskills-install.sh | bash -s -- \
  --tool codex \
  --skills sa.scanpy,sa.scvi-tools,sa.bulk-rnaseq,sa.pathway-enrichment,sa.cellxgene-census \
  --registry https://paperskills.com/api/registry

Recommended workflow

Step 1 · sa.scanpy

Choose the omics analysis path

View skill

Task for your agent

Use scanpy to inspect h5ad/counts data, run QC, normalization, dimensionality reduction, clustering, and marker exploration. Explain when scvi-tools is needed for batch correction.

Expected outputs

QC reportCell clustersMarker table

Step 2 · sa.bulk-rnaseq

Go from reads to differential expression

View skill

Task for your agent

Use bulk-rnaseq to design a reproducible path from QC and alignment/quantification to differential expression, with key QC thresholds.

Expected outputs

RNA-seq workflowQC thresholdsDE table

Step 3 · sa.pathway-enrichment

Interpret pathways and biology

View skill

Task for your agent

Use pathway-enrichment for ORA/GSEA on DE genes or markers, explaining pathways, background sets, multiple testing, and publishable figures.

Expected outputs

Enrichment resultsPathway interpretationFigure recommendations

scanpy

Standard single-cell RNA-seq analysis pipeline. Use for QC, normalization, dimensionality reduction (PCA/UMAP/t-SNE), clustering, differential expression, visualization, and converting R-friendly single-cell formats such as Seurat or SingleCellExperiment RDS files into h5ad for Scanpy. Best for exploratory scRNA-seq analysis with established workflows. For deep learning models use scvi-tools; for data format questions use anndata.

View skill

scvi-tools

Deep generative models for single-cell omics. Use when you need probabilistic batch correction (scVI), transfer learning, differential expression with uncertainty, or multi-modal integration (TOTALVI, MultiVI). Best for advanced modeling, batch effects, multimodal data. For standard analysis pipelines use scanpy.

View skill

bulk-rnaseq

End-to-end bulk RNA-seq orchestrator — takes raw FASTQ reads through QC and trimming (FastQC, fastp/Trim Galore), alignment and quantification (STAR, Salmon, featureCounts), assembles a gene-level counts matrix, then hands off to differential expression (pydeseq2), pathway/GSEA enrichment (pathway-enrichment), and publication figures (scientific-visualization). Use whenever the user has bulk RNA-seq reads or quant output and wants a complete, reproducible differential-expression workflow — e.g. "analyze my RNA-seq", "FASTQ to DESeq2", "run nf-core/rnaseq", "STAR/Salmon quantification", "build a counts matrix for DESeq2", or "go from reads to differentially expressed genes and enriched pathways". Routes between an nf-core/rnaseq (Nextflow) path and a standalone STAR/Salmon path, and covers experimental design, strandedness, and QC gates. For single-cell RNA-seq use the scanpy skill instead.

View skill

pathway-enrichment

Run pathway and gene-set enrichment analysis on gene lists or ranked gene data, then interpret the results. Use whenever the user has a set of genes (differentially expressed genes from PyDESeq2/Scanpy, CRISPR-screen hits, cluster marker genes, proteomics hits) and wants to know which biological pathways, GO terms, or gene sets are over-represented or enriched. Covers over-representation analysis (ORA / Enrichr / Fisher / hypergeometric), ranked Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA / preranked), single-sample scoring (ssGSEA/GSVA), and functional profiling via gseapy, g:Profiler, Enrichr libraries, MSigDB, GO, KEGG, Reactome, and WikiPathways — plus gene-ID mapping, choosing the right background universe, multiple-testing correction, redundancy reduction, dotplots/enrichment maps, and publication-ready tables. Use this for "pathway analysis", "enrichment analysis", "GO enrichment", "KEGG/Reactome pathways", "GSEA", "over-representation", "functional annotation", or "what pathways are my genes in".

View skill

cellxgene-census

Query the CZ CELLxGENE Census programmatically for versioned public single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data. Use when you need population-scale cell metadata, gene expression slices, Census summary counts, source H5AD URIs/downloads, embeddings, spatial Census data, or reference atlas comparisons across organisms, tissues, diseases, assays, and cell types. For analyzing your own local single-cell data use scanpy, anndata, or scvi-tools.

View skill
Figures and presentationsProteins, molecules, materials