This project, Illuminating Microbial Dark Matter through Data Science (DarkScience), tackles one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth: the fact that most microbes—tiny organisms that are essential for our health, the environment, and even the discovery of new medicines—remain completely unknown. While microbes drive processes that sustain ecosystems and human life, only a fraction of their vast diversity has been mapped because most species are nearly impossible to isolate in a lab. The DarkScience project brings together biology and advanced computer science to change this. By combining cutting-edge DNA sequencing with powerful machine learning, the team will develop new methods to recover and analyze genomes of these hidden microbes, and link them to environmental data. This will open the door to discovering new species, understanding how microbial communities shape our planet, and unlocking solutions to challenges like antibiotic resistance, waste recycling, and climate change