Luring Out The Missing Biosphere

Most of life on Earth is a mystery to us. The bulk of biomass on the planet is made up of microbes. By some estimates, there may be 150 million species of bacteria, but scientists have only formally named a few thousand of them. One of the big causes of this ignorance is that scientists don't know how to raise microbe colonies. If you scoop up some dirt and stick it under a microscope, you'll see lots of different microbes living happily there. If you mash up all the DNA in that mud and read its sequence, you'll discover an astonishing diversity of genes belonging to those microbes--thousands in a single spoon of soil. But now try to rear those microbes in a lab. When scientists try, they generally fail. A tiny fraction of one percent of microbe species will grow under ordinary conditions in Petri dish. This staggering difficulty ...