Designing The Analysis

Use before running any confirmatory analysis or looking at outcome data, when testing a hypothesis, computing a p-value, or about to claim an effect - locks predictions and decision rules before results are seen

If you're building skills for Claude, this is your lab notebook discipline.

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.

Build, run, and debug Nextflow data pipelines and nf-core workflows end to end. Use whenever the user mentions Nextflow, nf-core, .nf files, nextflow.config, DSL2, processes/channels/operators, samplesheets, or wants to run a community pipeline (e.g. nf-core/rnaseq, nf-core/sarek), write or test a module/subworkflow with nf-test, configure executors/containers (Docker, Singularity/Apptainer, Conda, Wave), scale a workflow to HPC/SLURM or cloud (AWS Batch, Google Batch, Azure, Kubernetes), or debug a failed/-resume run. Make sure to use this skill for any reproducible scientific/bioinformatics workflow work even if the user does not say the word "Nextflow", and for authoring nf-core-compliant pipelines, modules, configs, and linting.

Query the 1000 Genomes Project dataset (3,202 whole-genome-sequenced individuals, GRCh38) at the level of individual participants. Use when a question is about individuals or variants in the 1000 Genomes Project cohort: which individuals carry variants matching specific criteria in a gene or region, which individuals are homozygous-reference at a position, which variants exist in the dataset or carried by specified individuals in a gene or region, the relatedness between two specified individuals. Variants are returned with 1000 Genomes allele frequencies (AF), gnomAD v4.1 exome and genome AF, AlphaMissense score, and HGVSp annotations.

How to capture new reusable patterns into ktx's semantic layer - when a measure, segment, or join belongs in the catalog and how to write it generically so it stays small and useful over time. Loaded by the post-turn memory-agent only. The research agent does not write to the SL.