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  • TECHNOLOGY FEATURE

The search for microbial dark matter

Researchers are developing technologies to find and grow microbes that biologists have struggled to culture in the lab.
  1. Amber Dance

    1. Amber Dance is a freelance science journalist in the Los Angeles area.

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Every researcher who enters Yoichi Kamagata’s laboratory in the hope of growing interesting microorganisms undergoes an initiation: they try to culture Oscillospira guilliermondii, a bacterium found in the guts of cows and sheep, but never grown under lab conditions. Kamagata, a microbiologist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, has been fascinated with the rod-shaped microbes — ten or more times the size of the well-known gut denizen Escherichia coli — for more than a decade, because they seem to thrive only in animals that feast on fresh grass.

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Nature 582, 301-303 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01684-z

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