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Most antibiotic discovery efforts focus on bacteria and fungi, leaving the domain of archaea underexplored. Archaea are evolutionarily divergent from bacteria and eukaryotes, leading to unique metabolic pathways and defense mechanisms that might result in structurally and functionally distinct encrypted peptides -- short sequences within larger proteins that exhibit antimicrobial activity. Writing in Nature Microbiology, Torres et al. now use artificial intelligence to explore the sequence space of the archaeome for novel antimicrobial compounds.