New on BioRxiv: Nick Youngblut followed up on his recent Nature Communications publication that revealed a plethora of new microbial diversity for gut microbiomes of wild animals spanning 5 classes of vertebrates. Here, the whole collection of samples was shotgun sequenced and Nick generated metagenone-assembled genomes in the thousands. He combines these data with data of 14 published metagenomes to generate a vast new catalog of species-level genomes. These are explored for biosynthetic gene clusters and other functions, and compared across biomes (environmental versus host-associated) and also to ask what is enriched in mammals versus non-mammals. This rich trove helps improve dramatically the mappability of non-human host-associated microbiomes to reference databases. In collaboration with TU Wien’s Andreas H. Farnleitner and our favorite polar exploror Georg Reischer!