Microbial dark matter

Microbial dark matter[1][2] comprises the vast majority of microbial organisms (usually bacteria and archaea) that biologists are unable to culture in lab due to lack of knowledge or ability to supply the required growth conditions. Microbial dark matter is unrelated to the dark matter of physics and cosmology, but is so-called for the difficulty in effectively studying it as a result of its inability to be cultured by current methods. It is hard to estimate its relative magnitude, but the accepted gross estimate is that less than one percent of microbial species in a given ecological niche is culturable. In recent years effort is being put to decipher more of the microbial dark matter by means of learning their genome DNA sequence from environmental samples[3] and then by gaining insights to their metabolism from their sequenced genome, promoting the knowledge required for their cultivation.

See also

References
  1. Filee, J.; Tetart, F.; Suttle, C. A.; Krisch, H. M. (2005). "Marine T4-type bacteriophages, a ubiquitous component of the dark matter of the biosphere". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102 (35): 12471–12476. Bibcode:2005PNAS..10212471F. doi:10.1073/pnas.0503404102. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 1194919. PMID 16116082.
  2. University of Tennessee at Knoxville (25 September 2018). "Study: Microbial dark matter dominates Earth's environments". Eurekalert!. Retrieved 26 September 2018.
  3. Hedlund, Brian P.; Dodsworth, Jeremy A.; Murugapiran, Senthil K.; Rinke, Christian; Woyke, Tanja (2014). "Impact of single-cell genomics and metagenomics on the emerging view of extremophile "microbial dark matter"". Extremophiles. 18 (5): 865–875. doi:10.1007/s00792-014-0664-7. ISSN 1431-0651. PMID 25113821.
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