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).

Dear #Microbiology community 🧫
2025 was a highly successful year for #nfdi4microbiota: mid-term evaluation passed with flying colors, renewal proposal submitted & defended, widely used FAIR services launched, expanded training & outreach, and strengthened collaborations across #NFDI life sciences consortia. A highlight: our Annual Conference in Cologne, bringing the community together for exchange & networking.

We wish you peaceful holidays and a great start to a healthy and successful 2026! 🎄✨

During my PhD @borklab.bsky.social, we extracted drug side effect data from package inserts and used the dataset to predict new drug targets (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1158140) and pinpoint proteins that mediate the side effects (https://doi.org/10.1038/msb.2013.10). We also published the underlying database, but life intervened and funding changed, so SIDER http://sideeffects.embl.de/ is unfortunately gathering dust since its last update in 2015.

But there's good news: ChEMBL and OpenTargets are starting a new effort to mine the available data and produce a high-quality databases! Text-mining tools have progressed a lot in the last two decades, and I'm excited to see what can be done now.

More info https://chembl.blogspot.com/2025/12/new-position-nlp-data.html

Apply here: https://embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/EMBL/job/Hinxton-Cambridgeshire/NLP-Data-Scientist-Scientific-Data-Engineer_JR2866 The position is at EBI.