Nature Biotechnology published LexicMap, an algorithm that can search millions of bacterial and archaeal genomes for genes and mutations in minutes—addressing the scaling problem as genomic databases exceed two million sequences. The lead claim is that LexicMap achieves gold‑standard search sensitivity while delivering orders‑of‑magnitude faster query times, enabling rapid epidemiology, resistance‑gene surveillance and environmental gene discovery. Developers highlighted potential applications in pathogen tracking, antimicrobial resistance monitoring and ecological studies where timely, precise gene localization matters. The paper provides benchmarks against existing tools and notes implications for public‑health genomics workflows.