Experts at the University of Colorado Boulder have figured out a way to predict bacteria’s environmental pH preferences using artificial intelligence. This novel method can help guide ecological restoration initiatives, crop production, and creation of probiotics for health reasons.
Noah Fierer, CIRES Fellow and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU Boulder, explains that with the large number of bacteria present in various environments, their environmental preferences remain mostly unknown. The idea behind the machine learning method is to understand the natural history of these bacteria quicker.
To analyze the possibility of predicting bacteria’s environmental pH preferences from their genomes, Josep Ramoneda, a visiting scholar from CIRES, has co-authored research which was recently published in the Science Advances journal.
The study included more than 250,000 bacterial samples from soil, lake, and stream samples and was conducted in collaboration with other colleagues located in Canada. It compares a few bacterial groups which thrive at different pH levels and tries to make a connection between the genetic makeup and the preferred environment.
With the new approach, scientists will be able to grow colonies of bacteria previously impossible to isolate and breed. Moreover, it can help agriculture and Forestry experts understand more efficiently which types of bacteria should be used to restore native prairies, pine forests, corn fields, and soybean fields and can also determine how to best enrich soil with microbial life.
Ramoneda and Fierer envision that this method will also add insight into temperature preferences of bacteria, another area which requiring a large amount of genetic data. This could help understanding how global warming is impacting soil bacterial communities. Ultimately, artificial intelligence promises to make the process of assessing and studying these beneficial microbes far easier.
CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences) is a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established in 1988. Through interdisciplinary research, it strives to better understand natural systems, human systems, and their connection with the environment.
Noah Fierer is an American ecologist known for his pioneering of the analysis of bacterial communities using high throughput environmental DNA sequencing. His research interests include the ecology of microbial organisms in soil, aquatic, and human-associated locations, global environmental change, novel molecular and computational methods for environmental microbiome analysis, biogeography, and science education and communication.
