Overview
Microbes are foundational to life — driving processes in health, climate, and industry. Yet predicting how a microbe’s genome interacts with its environment to exhibit phenotypic traits remains a fundamental challenge. At Align, we’re working to close this gap by building high-resolution, standardized datasets that connect genotype to phenotype under diverse environmental conditions.
Through community workshops and partnership with leading researchers, we identified key opportunities where new datasets can unlock better models of microbial fitness, metabolism, and function. These priorities now anchor our Microbes Roadmap as part of our open data initiatives.
This workshop brought together scientists to identify microbiology dataset ideas that could drive the next generation of predictive models. Through guided discussions, participants developed proposals for new datasets — each with approaches for data and metadata collection to support robust modeling. These ideas shaped our first Microbial Dataset Proposal, and projects are now underway as part of Align’s open data initiative. The preliminary dataset ideas, predictive models, and data collection methods developed during the workshop are detailed in our Microbes Ideation Workshop Report.