Back

Eubiota: Modular Agentic AI for Autonomous Discovery in the Gut Microbiome

Lu, P.; Gao, Y.; Peng, W. G.; Zhang, H.; Zhu, K.; Robinson, E. K.; Xu, Q.; Kotaka, M.; Zhang, H. G.; Li, B.; Shiver, A. L.; Choi, Y.; Huang, K. C.; Sonnenburg, J.; Zou, J.

2026-02-28 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.02.27.708412 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The gut microbiome regulates many aspects of human biology, including immunity and inflammatory diseases, yet mechanistic discovery and translation remain constrained by fragmented workflows and manual hypothesis integration. Here, we present Eubiota, an open-source modular agentic framework that decomposes microbiome inquiry using specialized agents for planning, execution, verification, and grounded synthesis. Coordinated through shared memory and domain-specific tools, Eubiota employs reinforcement learning to optimize multi-turn reasoning, achieving 87.7% benchmark accuracy and outperforming GPT-5.1 by 10.4%. Across four case studies, Eubiota enabled end-to-end discovery with experimental validation. Screening nearly 2,000 bacterial genes, Eubiota identified the uvr-ruv DNA repair axis as a fitness determinant under inflammatory stress, validated using transposon mutants and IBD metagenomes. It further designed a four-strain consortium that attenuated colitis severity in mice and generated a commensal-sparing antibiotic cocktail, demonstrating its utility in addressing community-level design challenges at cellular and molecular levels. Finally, Eubiota discovered diet-associated metabolites that suppress NF-{kappa}B signaling. Together, these results establish Eubiota as a scalable, tool-grounded scientific copilot for mechanistically driven microbiome discovery.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.