Empower the Forgotten 99% of Life on Earth
Or, why AI in biology is overhyped
At Seanome, one of our values is “Empower the 99%,” which means to empower the forgotten 99% of biodiversity on the planet that has been missed by biomedical research thus far. As you’ll see, the scale of what has not yet been explored is far greater than what we’ve seen so far.
Forgotten 99% of Life on Earth: The Quadrillion-Scale Challenge
AI in biology is overhyped because, unlike natural language, where every document has been observed, not every biological sequence has been seen, and thus is not in the training data.
Imagine trying to understand all human language by studying Russian math textbooks. That's what we're doing with protein language models today. The input data is biased towards one source: human. Even our best AI tools like AlphaFold, while a significant advancement, were trained on a tiny, biased fraction of nature's molecular library. Of the estimated 14 quadrillion proteins1 in nature2, we have three-dimensional structures for only ~67,0003 of them — and a big chunk are from one species, human!
For the remaining ~2.2 billion species on the planet, their proteins are written in a language that we barely understand, and we need tools to decode them. We need to look beyond what we've seen to build better translators. That's why Seanome is diving into the ocean: Earth's greatest laboratory of molecular innovation.
Why Ocean Animals are the Ideal Testing Ground
The ocean is home to animals with unique adaptations that can’t exist on land, and has given us one transformative technology — green fluorescent protein (GFP) from glowing jellyfish. Without GFP, we wouldn’t be able to develop COVID vaccines4 or create “brainbows” to study the connections of the brain’s 100 billion neurons5. A wealth of potential applications in human health and longevity swims in our seas. These include unfreezable fish whose antifreeze proteins could preserve organs indefinitely, immortal jellyfish whose reversal of aging could transform what we think of a “normal” lifespan, and Seanome’s pilot project on Arctic clams whose neurotoxin tolerance could cure neurodegenerative disease.
The extraordinary biodiversity of marine animals — representing 76% of animal life6 and 43 billion7 genes8 — created fast-evolving immune systems to battle 100 million viruses per teaspoon of seawater9. This rich ecosystem is nature’s most diverse testing ground and offers a potential gold mine of novel therapeutics (including antivirals, antibiotics, antifungals) and an ideal environment for building better protein analysis tools. If we can decode the ocean’s molecular mysteries, we can understand anything.
The Forgotten 99% Will Transform Our Future
Breakthroughs like Ozempic (derived from lizard venom) and anti-HIV and anti-cancer compounds from a single innovative organism, ancient sea sponges, give us a glimpse of what’s possible. These discoveries come from a handful of species representing a tiny fraction of Earth’s biodiversity. We’ve only begun to explore nature’s 4 billion years of experiments.
At Seanome, we believe nature has solved quadrillions of molecular problems, but we lack the keys to access the doors they are behind. We’re building those keys. By creating tools to better understand biology, we enable access to nature’s solutions to disease that were previously invisible.
By focusing on the overlooked 99% of animals, we’re empowering researchers to make discoveries that could transform human health, longevity, climate, agriculture, and more.
Countless discoveries await us, hidden in the genomes of the forgotten 99% of life on Earth. Seanome is committed to illuminating this path — one protein at a time.
14 quadrillion proteins in the world estimated by 1.7 trillion microbial species (from Larsen 2017, below) x 5,000 proteins/species
See internal analysis on 2025-biodata-wealth-inequality using UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot Release 2024_06: 572,619 sequences
This paper used an improved version of GFP, mNeonGreen: Mulligan, Mark J., Kirsten E. Lyke, Nicholas Kitchin, Judith Absalon, Alejandra Gurtman, Stephen Lockhart, Kathleen Neuzil, et al. “Phase I/II Study of COVID-19 RNA Vaccine BNT162b1 in Adults.” Nature 586, no. 7830 (October 2020): 589–93. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2639-4.
Weissman, Tamily A, and Y Albert Pan. “Brainbow: New Resources and Emerging Biological Applications for Multicolor Genetic Labeling and Analysis.” Genetics 199, no. 2 (February 1, 2015): 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.114.172510.
Bar-On, Yinon M., Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo. “The Biomass Distribution on Earth.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 25 (June 19, 2018): 6506–11. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115.
Mora, Camilo, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G. B. Simpson, and Boris Worm. “How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?” PLOS Biology 9, no. 8 (August 23, 2011): e1001127. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127.
43 billion animal proteins in the ocean estimated by 2.15 million animals in the ocean from Mora et al and 20,000 proteins/species
Breitbart, Mya. “Marine Viruses: Truth or Dare.” Annual Review of Marine Science 4 (2012): 425–48. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-120709-142805.
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