The recovery of genomes from metagenomic datasets has provided genomic representation for hundreds of thousands of species from diverse biomes. But this is just a drop in the bucket. Low-abundance, rare and phylogenetically interesting microorganisms are often missed due to insufficient genomic coverage. In this workshop I will discuss how public metagenomic data can be mined specifically for the purposes of recovering novel genomes to improve taxon sampling for phylogenetics. I will focus on efforts to systematically improve representation of novel species at large scale, how to find novel prokaryotic genomes from specific lineages of interest, and how these techniques can be extended to recover novel microeukaryotic genomes.

The talk is part of the Computational Approaches to Early Evolution Workshop (April 20-24, 2026)