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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Prasoodanan Pk, Vishnu, Maistrenko, Oleksandr M, Fullam, Anthony, Mende, Daniel R, Kartal, Ece, Coelho, Luis Pedro, Spang, Anja, Bork, Peer, Schmidt, Thomas S B
Format: Artículo científico
Language:en
Published: Nature microbiology 2026
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Online Access:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41933201/
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Table of Contents:
  • Unbinned contigs expand known diversity in the global microbiome. Prasoodanan Pk, Vishnu Maistrenko, Oleksandr M Fullam, Anthony Mende, Daniel R Kartal, Ece Coelho, Luis Pedro Spang, Anja Bork, Peer Schmidt, Thomas S B Microbiota Archaea Bacteria Metagenome Phylogeny Biodiversity Soil Microbiology Ecosystem Genetic Variation Metagenomics The ongoing census of microbial life is hampered by disparate sampling across Earth's habitats, challenges in isolating uncultivated organisms, limited resolution in taxonomic marker gene amplicons and incomplete recovery of metagenome-assembled genomes. Here we quantify discoverable Bacterial and Archaeal diversity in a comprehensive, curated cross-habitat dataset of 92,187 publicly available metagenomes. Clustering 502 million sequences of 130 marker genes, we predict ~705,000 Bacterial and ~27,000 Archaeal species-level clades, the vast majority of which were hidden among unbinned contigs. We estimate that ten and 145 previously undescribed Archaeal and Bacterial phyla, respectively, are discoverable in this dataset. We identify soils and aquatic environments as hotspots of discoverable lineages, but predict that undescribed taxa remain abundant across all habitats. Finally, we show that prokaryotic diversity appears to arise within common evolutionary patterns, as clade size distributions follow power laws, consistently across the Tree of Life.