spliceailookup-link

An MCP server (Streamable HTTP) for splice-impact prediction. It wraps the Broad Institute's SpliceAI Lookup backends — the same SpliceAI, Pangolin and SpliceAI-10k consequence predictions the website surfaces — plus an Ensembl-VEP-backed variant resolver, as LLM-ergonomic tools.

Important

Research use only. Not clinical decision support. Do not use for diagnosis, treatment, triage, or patient management.

Why

SpliceAI Lookup is a website with Cloud Run endpoints behind it, not an API you can hand to an agent:

• Its errors are HTTP 200. A failure comes back as a normal 200 response with an error field in the JSON body, so a naive client reads "unparseable variant" as a result. This server inspects every body and returns a typed error envelope instead.
• Scoring accepts only CHROM-POS-REF-ALT. An HGVS string or an rsID has to be resolved first; resolve_variant does it via Ensembl VEP.
• The two models live at two endpoints, and the SpliceAI-10k consequence is buried inside the SpliceAI payload. predict_splicing runs both, surfaces the consequence, and says whether the models agree.
• The upstream is fragile on purpose: "interactive use only, several requests per user per minute", with cold calls taking 30s+. This server caches hard, caps concurrency, fast-fails wrong-build and no-transcript variants before the slow dispatch, paces callers via _meta.rate_budget, and emits progress notifications and MCP background tasks so an agent can fire-and-continue instead of blocking.

Quick start

Hosted — no install:

claude mcp add --transport http spliceailookup-link https://spliceailookup-link.genefoundry.org/mcp

Local (Python 3.12+, uv). There is no data build step — the server proxies the live upstreams:

uv sync --group dev
cp .env.example .env      # optional: override upstream hosts, limits, allowlists
make dev                  # FastAPI /health + MCP at http://127.0.0.1:8603/mcp
claude mcp add --transport http spliceailookup-link http://127.0.0.1:8603/mcp

predict_splicing(variant_id="chr8-140300616-T-G")
-> TRAPPC9 (GRCh38): SpliceAI Δ=0.83; Pangolin Δ=0.85; models agree; predicted exon skipping.

Streamable HTTP is the only transport — there is no stdio entry point, and TLS is terminated at your proxy. See Deployment.

Tools

Tool	Purpose
predict_splicing	Front door: SpliceAI and Pangolin plus the SpliceAI-10k consequence, with model agreement
predict_spliceai	SpliceAI delta scores (optionally the SAI-10k consequence)
predict_pangolin	Pangolin splice gain/loss scores
predict_splicing_batch	Score a whole gene panel in one call; fanned out server-side, and one bad variant does not fail the batch
resolve_variant	HGVS / rsID / loose coordinates → canonical CHROM-POS-REF-ALT + gene + consequence
get_server_capabilities	Discovery: tools, parameters, score glossary, limits, citations, capabilities_version hash
warmup	Pre-warm the cold upstream Cloud Run containers before a burst

Leaf names are unprefixed per Tool-Naming Standard v1, and the variant argument is the fleet-canonical variant_id (variant_ids for the batch tool). serverInfo.name is spliceailookup-link, but the router's namespace token is spliceai: behind the genefoundry-router gateway these surface as spliceai_<tool> — e.g. spliceai_predict_splicing. The gateway adds the prefix; the leaf names stay bare.

Data & provenance

Nothing is bundled or redistributed here: every prediction is computed on demand by the upstream and cached in-process (CACHE_TTL_MINUTES, default 1440). Freshness tracks the upstream; there is no snapshot to rebuild.

• Scoring — Broad Institute SpliceAI Lookup Cloud Run backends (SpliceAI, Pangolin, SpliceAI-10k), GRCh37 + GRCh38. Each response's provenance names the backend's transcript-annotation release.
• Resolution — Ensembl VEP REST. Neither upstream needs an API key; both are interactive-use-only and rate-limited, which is why the defaults are conservative.

Cite the models, not this wrapper:

• SpliceAI — Jaganathan K, et al. Cell 2019;176(3):535-548. PMID:30661751.
• Pangolin — Zeng T, Li YI. Genome Biology 2022;23:103. PMID:35449021.
• SpliceAI-10k — Canson DM, et al. Bioinformatics 2023.
• SpliceAI Lookup — Broad Institute, https://spliceailookup.broadinstitute.org
• Ensembl VEP — https://rest.ensembl.org

Documentation

• Configuration — every SPLICEAILOOKUP_LINK_* variable, the tuned defaults and why they are low, and the CLI.
• Deployment — transport, TLS, the exact Host/Origin allowlists, Docker, and multi-worker background tasks.
• Architecture — what the facade absorbs, the response contract, and what is deliberately out of scope.
• Data & upstreams — the upstream services, rate-limit etiquette, provenance and citations.
• Upstream API contract — the reverse-engineered SpliceAI Lookup / VEP behaviour this server is built against.
• AGENTS.md — conventions for humans and coding agents working in this repo.

Contributing

See AGENTS.md for repository conventions. make ci-local is the definition-of-done gate: format, lint, line budget, README standard, typecheck, tests.

License

MIT © 2026 Bernt Popp — the code in this repository. It grants no rights over the upstream services' outputs: predictions come from the Broad SpliceAI Lookup service and Ensembl VEP under their terms of use, and the model papers above must be cited. See Data & upstreams.