A team of scientists led by the Joint Genome Institute has used artificial intelligence to bring to view the hidden world of symbiotic microbes. The Symbiont Genomes catalog, one of the most comprehensive catalogs of these microbes, was built using AI to scan hundreds of thousands of microbial genomes and identify which ones live in partnership with a host.

The team identified more than 14,000 of these symbionts using a tool they developed call symclatron. The analysis drew on more than 31,000 publicly available environmental sequencing projects derived the JGI’s Integrated Microbial Genomes and Microbiomes database — one of the world’s largest repositories of microbial genomic data spanning soils, deep subsurface habitats, host-associated microbiomes, marine and freshwater systems and more, across all major continents and oceans. Learn more on the JGI’s website.