Credit: JING Gongchao Metagenomics - the study of genetic material from an environmental sample - is growing as species evolve or are discovered across the globe. To correlate the newly developed microbiomes with existing data sets, a team of researchers based in China has developed the Microbiome Search Engine 2 (MSE 2). It was published on Jan. 19 in mSystems, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. "Here, we introduce MSE 2, a microbiome database platform for searching query microbiomes in the global metagenome data space based on taxonomic or functional similarity of the whole microbiome," said co-first author JING Gongchao, Single-Cell Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Biofuels, Qingdao Institute of BioEnergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).