"We've learnt a lot about a small number of species," Jensen says. But "for a lot of bacteria, there's nothing for a language model, for an AI to read".
To quantify microbiology's bias towards a small number of model organisms, Jensen consulted a database of 43,409 unique bacterial species and counted the number of papers indexed by PubMed.
In a study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv last week, Jensen found that just 10 bacterial species account for half of all publications, whereas nearly three-quarters of all named bacteria don't have a single paper devoted to them.
As scientists expand the catalogue of microbial life with every skin swab, poo or soil sample they sequence, the chance to uncover new and unusual insights grows.
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