Invisible DNA lurks everywhere in the environment — and we're on the verge of decoding its secrets

Researchers on Viking's Octantis cruise ship are studying environmental DNA (eDNA) The term "environmental DNA" was coined in the 1980s in a study describing a technique for getting DNA from a soil sample.

Scientists are working to combine artificial intelligence with cutting-edge sequencing to rapidly identify changes in the types and numbers of organisms in a given ecosystem.

Eventually, that information could provide a real-time view of how the planet operates.

Using eDNA analysis to uncover evolutionary relationships between species and the different evolutionary paths they took could help scientists predict how climate change will affect different species.

The Viking-NOAA collaboration will need to integrate artificial intelligence into eDNA research.

AI is being used to find potentially new species from large data sets from camera traps and automated monitoring systems.

In the U.S. , around 40,000 eDNA samples have been collected in the past decade alone.

To draw useful conclusions to help us protect and manage the environment, AI needs to learn from a baseline database.

The ATLASea project aims to sequence the genomes of 4,500 marine species.

With money to develop the datasets, an AI eDNA tool could be ready "really fast".