Enabling desert revegetation by AI-tailored soil microbiome fortification

Mon, May 18 2026

Microbial communities Neuro-Symbolic AI protein function

Overview

AI-driven design of soil microbiomes for desert plant restoration; functional metagenomics analysis of arid-zone soil microbiomes.

Period: 2023–2025

Funding

KAUST Near Term Grand Challenge — Grant ID: REI/1/5235-01-01 (CoI) — USD 150,000

Team

Heribert Hirt — PI (KAUST (Center for Desert Agriculture))
Robert Hoehndorf — CoI (KAUST (Professor of Computer Science))
Gabriel Wittum — CoI (Goethe University Frankfurt / KAUST)
Arne Nägel — CoI (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Rund Tawfiq — PhD (alumnus) (Sano Centre Krakow (Postdoctoral researcher))

Publications acknowledging this project (6)

(2024) Predicting protein functions using positive-unlabeled ranking with ontology-based priors Supplementary Material
(2022) Context-based protein function prediction in bacterial genomes
(2022) INDIGENA: inductive prediction of disease--gene associations using phenotype ontologies Supplementary Material
(2022) Large-Scale Knowledge Integration for Enhanced Molecular Property Prediction
(2020) PAVS: A database of phenotype-associated variants in Saudi Arabia
(2018) Ontology Embedding: A Survey of Methods, Applications and Resources

Topics: Microbial communities, Neuro-symbolic AI, Protein function