Cellosaurus¶
Cellosaurus matters when a cell line arrives under four spellings and you need one stable identifier. MOLM13, MOLM-13, MV4-11 and MV4;11 all resolve to a CVCL accession, and that accession is the key every other cell line source joins on.
In BioMCP, Cellosaurus is the identity source for cell lines. Search returns ranked candidates with the match kind that separates a real line from a look-alike, and the detail card carries species, disease, category, sex, and age. Cross-references and curated sequence variations are explicit sections, so the base card stays small. BioMCP paces Cellosaurus at 3 requests / second because the provider publishes no rate limit.
What BioMCP exposes¶
| Command | What BioMCP gets from this source | Integration note |
|---|---|---|
search cell-line <name> |
Ranked candidate lines with accession, species, category, disease, and match kind | Identifier matches sort before synonym-only matches, and human lines first |
get cell-line <accession> |
Identity card: name, synonyms, species, disease, category, sex, age, RRID | The base card never fetches cross-references |
get cell-line <accession> xrefs |
DepMap, COSMIC, ChEMBL, Cell Model Passports, GDSC, PharmacoDB, and LINCS join keys | Every key is printed; a missing link is an empty list |
get cell-line <accession> variants |
Curated sequence variations with HGVS description, HGNC link, zygosity, and PubMed sources | Published as Cellosaurus wrote them; BioMCP adds no interpretation |
get cell-line <source-id> |
Reverse lookup from a DepMap, Cell Model Passports, ChEMBL, or PharmacoDB ID | One search request resolves the ID to its accession |
Example commands¶
Returns CVCL_2119 as an exact match. A hyphenated query such as MOLM-13 searches both spellings and merges the windows by accession.
Returns CVCL_0064, whose identifier is MV4-11. The punctuation does not change the answer.
Returns the MOLM-13 identity card with the RRID and the next commands for the two sections.
Returns the join keys, including DepMap ACH-000362.
Returns the curated DNMT3A, NPM1, and NRAS rows for OCI-AML-3.
Resolves the DepMap ID to CVCL_2119 and prints that card.
Release and attribution¶
Every cell line output names the Cellosaurus release it came from, read at runtime from the provider's own release endpoint. When that read fails, the output names the retrieval time instead. Cellosaurus data is CC BY 4.0, and every output carries the attribution line and the requested citation.
API access¶
No BioMCP API key required. Set BIOMCP_CELLOSAURUS_BASE to point at a different host.
Official source¶
Cellosaurus is the cell line knowledge resource behind BioMCP's cell line search rows and detail cards. It is also the RRID authority for cell lines.