Summary: Scientists at UC San Diego have created microbeMASST, the world’s largest microorganism database, compiling 100 million data points from 60,000 samples. This powerful tool can quickly identify microbes and their metabolites without prior knowledge, advancing research in health, ecology, and climate. Published in Nature Microbiology, it promises transformative scientific insights.
According to estimations by the United Nations, India has an average population density of 480 people per square kilometre. This means that, in the unfortunate case of a tyre puncture, you’d have to sort through nearly 500 people in your area on average to find the one mechanic in greasy (read: shining) armour to emancipate you of your cycle woes.
Luckily for us, advertising and online repositories have ensured that this isn’t really a problem we face in our day-to-day lives. But what database do we consult when we need to identify which of the 1,000 species of bacteria residing in our guts is causing us a specific problem?
Microorganisms exist virtually everywhere in and around us, playing an imposing part in regulating our ecosystems. For instance, plant growth is thoroughly reliant on nutrient-fixing soil microbes, while many other colonies help digest food in our stomachs. Despite being such a key player in supporting all bits of life on our planet, we know shockingly little about their individual impacts. And much of this can be attributed to a single unignorable problem: there’s just too much data!
Over time, scientists worldwide have gathered mountains of localised knowledge on the behaviour of these teeny organisms, such as the products they release during their metabolism processes. However, a single repository that captures all of this information has seemed like a pipe dream of gargantuan proportions — until now.
Collating more than 100 million data points across a whopping 60,000 distinct microbial samples from around the world, researchers from the University of California San Diego have developed a groundbreaking new search tool to help scientists studying the complex roles microbes play in
our environs and daily lives. Called microbeMASST, the database has the potential to revolutionise the life science research sector.
The repository, meticulously curated from community contributions and metadata of an enormous number of studies, includes information on microbe colonies from humans, plants, soils, animals, fish, and other water bodies. The researchers are optimistic that it will help overcome many of the ongoing issues with microbial research.
“One of the challenges of studying microbes at the molecular level is that it’s difficult to tell which microbes are producing which molecules, unless you already know what you’re looking for,” explains lead author Simone Zuffa. “If you think of colonies of microbes as crowded parties with lots of people talking, our current experiments can only record the sound, but we want to figure out a way to unscramble that audio to figure out who is saying what.”
The researchers proudly explain that microbeMASST can scan through the database to identify microbes from a sample in seconds, even without any “prior knowledge”. No other existing tool possesses such an impressive ability.
This development has the potential to help researchers shed all sorts of new light on the metabolic potential of microbial communities, which is often overlooked in modern experiments. This is also a growing concern for climate researchers, since microorganisms, despite their monumental contributions to elemental cycles and greenhouse gases, are often skipped in climate models.
As for the road ahead, the authors only expect the tool to improve over time as the scientific community gathers more referential data for the system. Exciting times await!
This research has been published in Nature Microbiology and can be accessed here.
