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Reading ecosystems like a book: AI method reveals hidden patterns in microbial communities in the Warnow

For a year, researchers took samples twice a week from 14 sampling points on the Warnow and the Baltic Sea, as shown here, analysed the microbiome and recorded environmental parameters.
For a year, researchers took samples twice a week from 14 sampling points on the Warnow and the Baltic Sea, analysed the microbiome and recorded environmental parameters. The dataset has now been analysed with a linguistic AI method. (Photo: C.Nietz, IOW)

Microbial communities are highly sensitive to environmental changes, yet their enormous diversity makes it difficult to identify ecological patterns. A research team from the IOW has now shown that an AI method originally developed for text analysis can be successfully applied to the analysis of complex environmental samples. The method identified five seasonally successive microbial sub-communities in the Warnow estuary while preserving ecological and functional information just as well as conventional methods – in some cases they even performed better. The study has now been published in the journal “Environmental Microbiome”.

 

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