The Microbiology Society has launched Microbiology Horizons, a new multidisciplinary journal designed to address emerging scientific challenges through integrative and data-driven approaches. The journal has been created in response to increasingly complex and multidisciplinary societal challenges, alongside the growing use of advanced tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that can identify patterns in large datasets beyond human observation. The initiative also reflects opportunities to enhance technologies involving imaging and sequence analysis to generate novel forms of data. The Microbiology Society notes that microbiology provides essential insight for tackling these developments, motivating the addition of Microbiology Horizons to its existing portfolio.
Microbiology Horizons is led by an editor-in-chief whose research focuses on multimodal and multiscale data analysis, incorporating omics, bioinformatics, machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence to address complex issues related to antimicrobial resistance and resistant infectious diseases.
Insights shared about the journal emphasize that microbiology and related disciplines are entering a period shaped by data, automation, and integrated research methods. According to these perspectives, understanding the microbial world requires broad, interconnected study that links genes, microbes, hosts, ecosystems, and societies through transdisciplinary work. The journal is intended to serve as a venue where researchers from diverse fields can jointly examine and design microbial systems, with an emphasis on mechanistic and predictive studies that span molecular to planetary scales. The initiative also places importance on openness, reproducibility, and responsible innovation, with a stated goal of supporting discovery research that anticipates global challenges.
Additional views highlight that Microbiology Horizons intends to use artificial intelligence to examine microbial behavior, adaptation, evolution, and interactions across environments and scales. These perspectives describe the journal’s focus on addressing major global issues rather than narrow subtopics, emphasizing connections to antimicrobial resistance, food and water security, climate change, and sustainability. The journal seeks research integrating life sciences, data science, and social and policy dimensions within frameworks such as One Health and Planetary Health. It is positioned as a platform that brings together experimental and computational researchers, supports open sharing of methods, and encourages discoveries that focus on anticipating problems rather than reacting to them.
The Microbiology Society has identified this journal as its first title to adopt a fully multidisciplinary approach to global challenges in microbiology, aiming to provide a space for innovation and advancement across the field. Broader perspectives within the Society indicate that data and new analytical methods are transforming microbiology, drawing researchers into areas such as climate change, human noncommunicable diseases, and environmental science through the ability to analyze metadata, genomes, and microbiomes at scale. The establishment of Microbiology Horizons is described as part of the Society’s broader need to adapt to these shifts.
Microbiology Horizons will serve as a venue to explore new technologies and microbiology-based solutions, as well as the role of microbiology in advancing the global Sustainable Development Goals. Submissions are now open, and the journal website provides information for prospective authors.
The Microbiology Society operates as a membership charity and not-for-profit publisher, noting that each submission to its journals contributes to supporting microbiologists and the wider community.
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