BioMCP

Highlights
Democratizing agentic access to bioinformatics and biopharmaceutical databases and analyses.
- Section-based federated access to 50+ bioinformatics, pharmaceutical, and patent databases
- Optional toolboxes for local database curation and dependency-free analysis with Bioconductor and SAM/BED/BCFtools — no R installation, C toolchain, or containers
- Concrete example vignettes, developed fully in the open
Install
npx -y biomcp doctor # diagnose a machine: Node gate, config health, feature gates, peer deps
npx biomcp # zero-config stdio MCP server (this is what MCP clients run); Node >= 22.13
Setup is guided in docs/AGENT-INSTALL.md — a one-minute start, copy-paste config entries for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode (one canonical pinned command covering every feature), biomcp doctor as the single troubleshooting entry point, and agent-friendly paths for API keys and optional features.
Multiple agents on one machine: biomcp enforces arXiv's Terms-of-Use rate limit (1 request / 3 s) per process. When running multiple biomcp MCP instances on one machine (e.g., one stdio instance per agent), rate limits are not coordinated across processes, and arXiv's TOU applies to all your machines in aggregate. For multi-agent single-machine deployments, run a single shared biomcp serve daemon (see docs/SELF-HOSTING.md) so all agents share one process and one global rate limiter.
Available Tools
Full tool schemas (params, enums, defaults) live in src/server/README.md.
Gene (7)
Variant (4)
Drug (3)
Disease (4)
Article (4)
Trial (2)
Utility (2)
Structural Biology (1)
Patents (2)
GEO (2)
SRA (2)
GenBank (3)
GTEx (2)
Ensembl (4)
R Analysis (4, optional — ANALYSIS_R=1)
First use starts a ~1 GB WebAssembly R worker and downloads the wasm package bundle (~62 MB) from GitHub releases (cached). Requires webr installed next to biomcp. Guide: docs/R-ANALYSIS.md.
Biowasm Analysis (8, optional — ANALYSIS_BIOWASM=1)
First use downloads checksum-verified wasm assets (~4.5 MB, cached); no extra npm packages. Indexed sources answer region queries with fast positional retrieval (~0.2 % of file read); indexless sources fall back to streaming BED filters. Guide: docs/BIOWASM-ANALYSIS.md.
Citation Module
Citations federate 5 providers in fast (~4s) or full (~15-30s) mode. Forward citation lists come from Europe PMC, OpenCitations, and Semantic Scholar; Crossref supplies counts and backward references. Provider matrix and schema details: src/server/README.md.
Optional Features
Capabilities that ship with the package but stay inactive until enabled. Each links to its own guide:
Instead of hand-editing env blocks, agents (and users) can self-serve through the always-available biomcp_configure tool: it reports every parameter's status/provenance, writes the .biomcp.json project config file for the optional features above (env vars keep precedence; env-only parameters are query-only and value-masked), validates changes, detects conflicts, checks peer-dependency prerequisites, and spells out the restart/verify steps. Details: docs/ENV-VARS.md → Project config file.
Documentation
License
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See NOTICE for attributions.
BioMCP-TS is adapted from the upstream BioMCP Rust project (MIT) with an agent-first development approach and enhancements — kudos to the original authors.