Microbiology Horizons
Aims and scope
Some of the most significant challenges facing humanity – AMR, climate change, food security – are not just scientific problems, but socio-scientific problems. Their solutions require the intersection of basic research, social science, technological development, industry, and government. The traditional siloed approach to scientific research is insufficient for tackling these problems, and instead an interdisciplinary approach is required involving stakeholders from all these groups.
Microbiology offers powerful tools and insight for addressing these challenges. By understanding and harnessing the power of microorganisms, we can develop innovative solutions for a more sustainable and healthy future. Microbiology Horizons aims to help tackle these great challenges by providing a venue for both multidisciplinary research spanning microbiology and adjacent scientific fields, and interdisciplinary work connecting microbiology to social science and policymaking.
At the same time, artificial intelligence has emerged as a transformative technology, revolutionising how research can be approached and conducted, enabling predictive, explainable, and automated large-scale analyses that uncover hidden mechanisms, accelerate discovery, and bridges scales from genes to microorganisms to ecosystems. The synergism between the AI and microbiology has the potential to redefine how we understand and address global challenges, from health to climate, by opening entirely new frontiers of knowledge and innovation. Artificial intelligence adds a complementary layer, enabling a 360-degree analysis that connects microbiology with One Health, planetary health, climate research, and environmental data. This integration does not simply provide new insights but creates a pioneering framework for anticipating future risks, guiding preventive rather than reactive interventions, and designing sustainable solutions that can transform the way societies respond to global change.
Taking a traditional topic-centred approach makes it difficult to capture this complexity and build a coherent narrative across the microbial scales. Instead, Microbiology Horizons will take a challenge-focused, multi-scale, and multi-modal approach, built around important societal and research issues and how they map across microbiology.
The journal will provide a platform to discuss the development of new technologies and solutions based on microbiology, the integration of artificial intelligence and data science into microbial research pipelines, advances in science and technology that further advance the field, as well as the vital role of microbiology in addressing the global Sustainable Development Goals.
Microbiology Horizons will champion open and reproducible research with code and data availability. We welcome novel research, reviews and perspectives from across the breadth of microbiology and interconnected fields, as well as interdisciplinary research connecting microbiology, social science and policymaking. Contributions are encouraged on interconnected approaches to public health such as One Health, EcoHealth and Planetary Health, as well as integrative systems microbiology such as multi-omics studies. Articles presenting novel computational or experimental techniques, workflows, pipelines, and datasets of high importance to interdisciplinary microbiology research are also encouraged.
We particularly welcome integrative studies that use artificial intelligence to generate mechanistic understanding or actionable insights in microbial systems. Microbiology Horizons serves as an inclusive community spanning microbiologist, data scientists, computational biologists, clinicians, environmental scientists, social scientists, policy and experts. Key thematic areas include:
- Translational microbiology and global health: AI-driven diagnostics, AMR, microbial engineering for biofuels, therapeutics, etc.,
- One Health, planetary health, and social dimension of microbiology: integration of human, animal, and environmental data; socio-behavioural drivers of microbial transmission and evolution, policy translation and governance
- Experimental microbiology enhanced by AI: synthetic biology design, and automated phenotyping
- Microbiology and ecosystem modelling: microbiome networks, environmental microbiology under exposome pressures
Information for authors
For more information about submitting to Microbiology Horizons, please see our Article types, Prepare an article and Submission and peer review pages.
Publishing Model
This journal will be launched under a hybrid model. During the promotional launch period (three years from the publication date of the first article), all articles published will be free to read until the end of this period. Following this, all articles without an Open Access licence will move behind a paywall. Authors can opt to publish under an Open Access licence to allow non-paywalled access to their paper in perpetuity: see our available Routes to Open Access.
Contact us
Email the journal Editorial Office at [email protected]
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By phone:
Call +44 (0)20 3034 4870
By post or in person:
Microbiology Society
14–16 Meredith Street
London
EC1R 0AB
United Kingdom