Dr. Tomer Altman describes the atypical origin of the Serratus project and explains why Serratus is such a big leap forward from doing a sequence search with something like BLAST. Dr. Altman dives into the nuts and bolts of how Serratus works and how it was used to find entirely new branches of the tree of life, filled in with previously uncharacterized coronaviruses. Dr. Altman also outlines potential future uses of systems like Serratus for things like biosurveillance and human health in relation to the human microbiome. Learn more about Serratus at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.07.241729v1