Nature Communications: AMPLiT Tool Identifies Antimicrobial Peptides From Ancient Human Gut Microbiomes (Coprolite Metagenomes)
A 2026 Nature Communications paper introduced AMPLiT — a tool for screening antimicrobial peptide candidates in metagenomic datasets — and applied it to human coprolite metagenomes (ancient stool samples). The team identified candidate AMPs from extinct gut-microbiome lineages that have functional activity against modern multidrug-resistant pathogens. The approach extends the AMP-discovery search space from contemporary microbial sequences to the much-larger reservoir of evolutionary AMPs encoded in ancient host-microbiome assemblies preserved in archaeological samples. The strategy joins the broader 2026 AI-AMP wave (ProteoGPT, CAMPER, the AI-driven AMP characterization paper in Scientific Reports) as an alternative source of novel chemistry against ESKAPE pathogens. The work positions ancient-DNA-based AMP discovery as a credible track alongside computational design.