Identifying rare microorganisms in microbiome data just got easier. A team of researchers from Portugal and Canada has developed a new tool that uses machine learning to automatically detect rare biosphere in ecological datasets.

The aim is to quickly, autonomously and unsupervisedly identify rare microorganisms in microbiome datasets. This new tool, named ulrb, responds to a long-standing challenge in microbial ecology: distinguishing rare microorganisms from the most abundant in natural environments.

The new methodology and the new ulrb software have now been published in the study “Definition of the microbial rare biosphere through unsupervised machine learning” in the journal Communications Biology.