We investigate key mechanisms of microbial interactions to better understand the microbial world around us and make discoveries that will lead to novel biotechnological tools and new clinical approaches. Our research combines metagenomics, allowing us to explore a vast diversity of microbes in their natural environment, along with cutting-edge machine learning, language models, and molecular approaches to predict, characterize, and test the function of genes of interest. The systems we study include novel antimicrobial resistance genes, phage defense mechanisms (focusing on CRISPR-Cas), and mo