A Review of Artificial Intelligence Applications in Bacterial Genomics

Because of the different genetic structures and functional gene diversity, bacterial genome data have high complexity and dimensions. Therefore, it is difficult to reveal the sequence patterns and biological mechanism of a genome with classical analysis methods. Since artificial intelligence (AI) applications are capable of mining key biological information from massive multidimensional data, they are broadly employed to analyze bacterial genomes. However, to our knowledge, there are few systematic reviews that illustrate these AI applications in bacterial genomics research. Therefore, we first introduce the characteristics of bacterial genomics, and then briefly summarize AI applications in bacterial genomics research from three aspects: gene finding, gene function prediction and gene expression network construction. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future AI applications in bacterial genomics research.