a more literate article about the recent progress in culturing the 99% of bacteria that don’t grow in lab conditions.

This idea of going after cryptic bacterial strains has been around for a long time, but getting it to work has been another thing entirely. This is the most solid example that I’m aware of, and I hope that it’s just the opening of a new platform for antibiotic drug discovery. The traditional search for natural product antibiotics has pretty well come to a shuddering halt over the years – no matter how much effort you put into increasingly exotic soil samples and the like, you keep finding the same things (if you find anything at all). Unculturable organisms are the new frontier, and the iChip is going to be nowhere near the last word in exploring it. And at the same time, you have outfits like Warp Drive Bio trying to get organisms to express unusual compounds that aren’t normally seen, so the hope is that there are a lot of useful things out there that that we have never heard of.

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