Fudan University's Nature Long Article Released: Building a Global Catalog of Microbial Genes

Microorganisms are ubiquitous in the earth, hidden in people's skin, intestines, soil, rivers, oceans and other environments, forming a complex microbiome community
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They interact symbiotically with different hosts in different environments, and become an important factor affecting human health, disease development, and earth ecological changes

Young Researcher Luis Pedro Coelho, Professor Zhao Xingming, and Emeritus Professor Peer Bork from the Brain-inspired Intelligence Science and Technology Research Institute of Fudan University (hereinafter referred to as the "Brain-Institute") Cooperative research with scientists from Germany, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries.

Based on the concept of global microbiome, the microorganisms in different habitats on the earth are used as a unified system, and artificial intelligence technology is used to analyze 13,000 public metagenomic samples.

In the early morning of December 16, 2021, Beijing time, the related research result "Towards the biogeography of prokaryotic genes" was published in the main journal of "Nature" in the form of a long article.

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Coelho is the first author and co-corresponding author of the paper

Constructing the most comprehensive global catalog of microbial genes to date

Gene catalogs are important for describing the species composition and functional properties of microbial communities
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Since the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and BGI established the first human gut microbial gene catalog in 2010, emerging microbial gene catalogs have provided important clues for studying human physiology and disease

The Global Microbial Gene Catalog (GMGC) covers the main habitats of 14 microorganisms in the gut, oral cavity, skin, ocean, soil, etc.

, collecting 13,174 publicly available high-quality metagenomes and 84,029 high-quality Genomes of high quality, including 303 million species-level genes (95% nucleic acid consistency clustering), have constructed the most comprehensive global microbial gene catalog (Figure 1) to date, which will be used for earth ecology research and human health research.

Uncover important associations between microbial genes and habitats

Species-level unigenes may represent multi-habitat genes
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Multi-habitat genes may come from species that live in multiple habitats, or from mobile elements that transfer horizontally between genomes or across habitat boundaries

The researchers further examined the frequency of single-gene clusters in the metagenome and found that most single-gene clusters were rare genes with a frequency of less than 0.
1%
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The frequencies of single-gene clusters obey a power law distribution under the assumption of neutral (or near-neutral) evolution

These findings have important implications for understanding the emergence of antibiotic resistance and the development of future antibacterial drugs
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A multidisciplinary international research team

The biomedical artificial intelligence team of Fudan University's Brain-inspired Research Institute focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and biomedicine, and has introduced a group of outstanding scholars at home and abroad since 2018
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The team has backgrounds in different disciplines such as computer, mathematics, biology, physics, etc.
, which are cross-integrated and have a strong international atmosphere

Coelho, the first author of the paper, joined Fudan full-time in 2018, and previously focused on the analysis of microbial populations using metagenomic and microscopic imaging techniques
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Since joining the Fudan Brain-inspired Research Institute, he has found that this is a large team with interdisciplinary integration and a high degree of internationalization.
One-third of his colleagues are from different countries.
The academic team and other research groups cooperate and communicate, participate in the construction of the key laboratory of the Ministry of Education for computational neuroscience and brain-like intelligence, and participate in a number of major research projects such as biomedical big data, brain science and brain-like research as the backbone of the project.
Data methods are engaged in related researches such as microbiome and precision medicine
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As the head of the biomedical artificial intelligence team of the Brain-inspired Research Institute, Professor Zhao Xingming introduced that frontier science is increasingly breaking the boundaries of disciplines, requiring a global perspective and a global perspective
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This study constructs a catalog of microbial genes from a global perspective, which plays an important role in understanding the relationship between microorganisms and human health
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In the next step, based on the developed gene catalog, the team will further cooperate with domestic and foreign scientific research institutes and clinical medicine to explore the influence of microorganisms including human gut microbes on human life and health, brain cognition and behavior
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Paper link: https://