Uncultured: The Unknown Microbiomes that Monopolize the World

The disparity between the number of bacterial species we know of versus what we don’t know is staggering. Much of this is due to that fact that scientists have not been able to culture many of these microbes in the lab. Now, a new study from investigators at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville suggests that uncultured microbes—those whose characteristics have never been described because they have not yet been grown in a lab culture—could be dominating nearly all the environ