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gffutilsAI: An AI-Agent for Interactive Genomic Feature Exploration in GFF files

Bassi, S.; Gonzalez, C.; Yang, T.

2025-12-05 bioinformatics
10.64898/2025.12.02.690645 bioRxiv
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AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWThe General Feature Format (GFF) is widely used to represent genomic annotations, but its hierarchical, multi-attribute structure makes manual querying and analysis challenging. Existing libraries such as gffutils provide programmatic interfaces, yet they require coding proficiency. gffutilsAI is a novel AI-powered command-line agent that enables researchers to perform interactive, natural-language-driven exploration of GFF files. Built on top of the gffutils library and the Strands AI agent framework, gffutilsAI integrates local and cloud-based large language models (LLMs) such as Llama 3.1, GPT-5, and Claude 3.5 to translate human queries into executable actions. The tool supports coordinate-based queries, attribute and GO searches, hierarchical traversal, statistical summaries, and CSV export, offering a new paradigm for accessible conversational genomics.

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