1 trillion species, 3 billion years: how we used AI to trace the evolution of bacteria on Earth

By Ben Woodcroft, Associate Professor of Microbial Informatics, Queensland University of Technology
Adrián A. Davín, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Biology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

There are roughly a trillion species of microorganisms on Earth – the vast majority of which are bacteria.

Bacteria consist of a single cell. They do not have bones and are not like big animals that leave clear signs in the geological record, which thankful palaeontologists can study many millions of years later.

This has made it very hard for scientists to establish a timeline of their early evolution. But with the help of machine learning, we have been able to fill in many of the details.…

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