There are more microbes in, on, and around the planet than there are stars in the Milky Way. Microbes affect food production; air quality; natural breakdown of plants, trees and biomass; soil quality for agriculture; and much more. To work with these microbes, scientists need to learn more about how microbes and viruses interact. Viruses influence microbes’ abilities to work. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute built the largest publicly available database for viruses. This single effort increases the number of known viral genes by a factor of 16. Further, in a series of four articles published in Nucleic Acids Research, DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers report on the latest updates to several other publicly accessible databases and computational tools. These databases and tools will benefit the global community of microbial researchers.