Bio-chat: Hardcore Primer Designer

Designs high-specificity RT-qPCR primers and probes with homology mapping, high-GC optimization, TaqMan/SYBR support, and off-target specificity checks.

This skill appears to do what it says: it fetches sequences from NCBI and runs primer/probe design locally without requesting secrets. Before installing/using: (1) Note the SKILL.md claim that local FASTA input is supported is inaccurate — the current script expects NCBI accessions and will try to fetch from NCBI; if you need local FASTA support, modify the script or pass sequences another way. (2) The homology/junction mapping uses simple substring searches and minimal GenBank parsing — this can produce incorrect junction mappings for real-world, noisy sequences; validate outputs manually before ordering primers. (3) The script performs outbound network requests to NCBI (no authentication) — if your environment disallows network egress, run it locally with vetted inputs. (4) There are no hidden endpoints or credential exfiltration, but because this is a biological assay tool, ensure you have appropriate institutional approvals and biosafety review before designing assays for regulated or pathogenic organisms. Finally, review and test the code on non-sensitive examples, and ensure 'requests' is installed in the Python environment.

Type: OpenClaw Skill Name: rtqpcr-primer-design Version: 5.1.0 The skill bundle is a legitimate bioinformatics tool for designing RT-qPCR primers and probes. The core logic in `scripts/design_qpcr_assay.py` implements standard biological algorithms such as the SantaLucia (1998) Nearest-Neighbor model for Tm calculation and uses official NCBI E-utils APIs (eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) to fetch sequence data. No evidence of data exfiltration, malicious execution, or prompt injection was found.