AllTheBacteria: a community resource empowers biology and discovers novel peptide antibiotics

AllTheBacteria processes 2,440,377 high-quality bacterial and archaeal genomes from 11,273 species into a searchable platform, enabling AI-guided antimicrobial discovery.

• Why it matters: Public microbial sequencing is hard to reuse at scale due to inconsistent assembly, quality control, annotation, and searchability, limiting downstream biology and drug discovery.
• What they did: The team built a uniformly processed resource with standardized taxonomy, annotations, resistance and antiphage-defense calls, structure predictions, and AI-ready tables, then mined 3,919,096 peptide fragments with APEX 1.1 to find 1,867 candidates.
• The result: From 24 synthesized peptides tested on 20 clinically relevant bacterial strains, multiple showed low-micromolar antimicrobial activity, and ATB20 reduced Acinetobacter baumannii burden in a murine skin abscess model with efficacy comparable to polymyxin B.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.