Has a company really discovered a million new species?

The claim that over a million new species have been discovered by Basecamp Research refers to microscopic bacteria rather than visible plants or animals. Rob Finn from the European Bioinformatics Institute explains that these discoveries are made through metagenomics, a process where environmental samples like water or soil are filtered and "whizzed up" to create a DNA soup. Instead of observing live cultures, scientists use computational power to reconstruct genomes from genetic fragments, defining a "species" as any two genomes sharing less than 95% DNA identity. While this destructive method prevents the study of living specimens, it allows researchers to map a microbial world estimated to contain a trillion species—matching the number of stars in the Milky Way. This digital cataloging of life provides a massive dataset for training AI and identifying potential new medicines from the Earth's most extreme environments.