Many people already work in Claude or ChatGPT. You can now connect either one to Omicsboard Lab, so the assistant can run real bioinformatics tools on your account and read the results back to you. It uses an open standard called MCP (Model Context Protocol), and it is available today to paid accounts.
What your assistant can do
Once connected, you can ask your assistant, in plain words, to:
- List the available tools and explain what each one needs.
- Upload a small file to a project (up to 10 MB), or fetch a public sequence from NCBI by accession. One record per request, up to 10 MB, ten per hour.
- Run one of twelve tools: FastQC, fastp, MLST, AMRFinderPlus, ResFinder, MOB-suite, QUAST, MAFFT, trimAl, IQ-TREE, ClinVar annotation and SnpEff.
- Check on a long run, and read back small results: text tables, reports and trees, FASTA and VCF files, and PNG or JPEG images.
For example: “Fetch NC_009648.1 into my project, run AMRFinderPlus on it, and summarise the hits.”
Connect it
- You need a verified email and a paid plan or a top-up. Free accounts cannot connect yet.
- In Claude, choose Add custom connector. In ChatGPT, add a custom connector (what you see depends on your ChatGPT plan). Use this address:
https://cloud.omicsboard.com/mcp. - Your assistant opens an Omicsboard sign-in page. Sign in, read the screen, which names the app and what it will be able to do, and choose Allow.
- Start a new chat and ask for the tools by name.
If your assistant shows an old list of tools after we add new ones, remove the connector, add it again and start a new chat.
You stay in control
- See and disconnect. In Omicsboard Lab, open Settings and the MCP Connector tab. Under Connected apps you can see every app that is connected, when it was last used, and disconnect it. Disconnecting asks first and takes effect within minutes.
- The app names itself. The name shown on the sign-in screen is the one each app gives itself. We do not verify it, and the screen says so. Only allow apps you started.
- Access keys. For tools that accept a key instead of the sign-in screen, the same tab can create a personal access key. You can have three at a time, each lasts 90 days, it is shown once, and you can revoke it.
Usage and billing
Runs use your account’s usage exactly as they do in the app. If your allowance is used up, your assistant will give you a link to the pricing page. You pay in Omicsboard Lab, never in the chat.
Privacy: please read this
- Anything that goes back to your assistant first passes through our data guard, which removes raw sequence lines, email addresses, phone numbers and similar personal fields, and tells the assistant that it did.
- But your assistant’s provider still sees what you type and what comes back. Do not use the connector with patient-identifiable data, or with data you are not allowed to share with an outside AI provider.
- Organizations that are set up as data-protected cannot use the connector.
Limits
- One run at a time, and up to 30 runs an hour per account.
- The connector exposes twelve tools. It does not offer the Python or R notebook, assemblers, GATK or the viral tools.
- Large files (BAM, FASTQ and compressed files) cannot be read back through the assistant.
- Assistants can summarise results badly. Check the output, and use it for research, not diagnosis.
Get it
Open app.omicsboard.com or the desktop app, go to Settings and look for the MCP Connector tab. For the tools behind it, see our cloud tools post, and for the rest of this release, what is new in 1.5.49.