We hope the approach and our draft 'periodic table' are useful and encourage future efforts to systematically characterize trait variance across the bacterial tree of life.(6/6)

Perhaps more importantly, the workflow for generating the 'periodic table' is adaptable so it can ultimately be expanded to incorporate additional traits/taxa (5/6).

Our draft 'periodic table' of bacterial diversity, like the periodic table of the elements, provides a interpretable & concise way to visualize and explore bacterial diversity in trait space (see Figs 4-5) - linking phylogeny to trait distributions in a quantifiable manner (4/6)

Here we focused on 6 traits - inferring those traits (including autotrophy, O2 tolerance, phototrophy, etc.) using genome-based models across >50,000 bacterial 'species' (thanks @ace-gtdb.bsky.social!) (3/6)

Work was motivated by the challenges associated with linking taxonomic/phylogenetic information to knowledge of what we know (or think we know) about bacterial traits (2/6)

I agree with both of these papers. Given that they were published >10 years ago, why is the 'hologenome' concept still a thing?

See Table 1 of this paper: bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Correct - if you filtered a few liters of your saliva for DNA extraction, you would undoubtedly have far far higher DNA yields than a few liters of household water

Excellent work (and very well-written)

This looks awesome. Open to PhD students from the US?

👆 Yes. 100% agreed.

Might be a useful alternative: www.arb-silva.de/aligner/

See recent papers from my group, including those led by @josepramoneda.bsky.social