Oleksandr Maistrenko1d ago

There is a lot of undescribed prokaryotic diversity in existing whole-genome metagenomic data!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-026-02314-6

We predict that there are >500,000 novel bacterial and >20,000 novel archaeal species. There are at least 145 novel bacterial and 10 archaeal phylum-level clades. While according to GTDB, there are genomes for only <140,000 bacterial and <20,000 archaeal species (which corresponds to169 and 20 phyla in Bacteria and Archaea respectively).

Unbinned contigs expand known diversity in the global microbiome - Nature Microbiology

Re-analysis of over 92,000 metagenomes reveals hundreds of thousands of previously undescribed Bacterial and Archaeal clades hidden in plain sight.

Nature
Show threadOleksandr Maistrenko
“Isolate genomes and metagenomic assembled genomes captured only 20–50% of discoverable species in metagenomic contigs, but metagenomic assemblies likewise failed to capture around 50% of the diversity represented by isolates.”
Apr 6 at 3:34pmWeb