ArticleApplied and environmental microbiology2012
Microbial scout hypothesis and microbial discovery.
Article in Applied and environmental microbiology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Differential recovery of chain-elongating bacteria: comparing droplet, plating, and dilution-to-extinction methods.mSystems · 2025Article
- Returning to Nature for the Next Generation of Antimicrobial Therapeutics.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- A new antibiotic from an uncultured bacterium binds to an immutable target.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Article
- Bioprospecting of Novel Extremozymes From Prokaryotes-The Advent of Culture-Independent Methods.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Review
- Triggering Growth via Growth Initiation Factors in Nature: A Putative Mechanism forFrontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- Development of a novel cultivation technique for uncultured soil bacteria.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Isolation of Previously Uncultured Slow-Growing Bacteria by Using a Simple Modification in the Preparation of Agar Media.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2018Article
- Wake me when it's over - Bacterial toxin-antitoxin proteins and induced dormancy.Experimental biology and medicine (Maywood, N.J.) · 2016Review
- The rebirth of culture in microbiology through the example of culturomics to study human gut microbiota.Clinical microbiology reviews · 2015Article
- Mining the metabiome: identifying novel natural products from microbial communities.Chemistry & biology · 2014Review
- Lassomycin, a ribosomally synthesized cyclic peptide, kills mycobacterium tuberculosis by targeting the ATP-dependent protease ClpC1P1P2.Chemistry & biology · 2014Article
- Environmental reservoirs and mechanisms of persistence of Vibrio cholerae.Frontiers in microbiology · 2013Review
- Patterns and processes of microbial community assembly.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2013Review
- Dispersal of thermophilic Desulfotomaculum endospores into Baltic Sea sediments over thousands of years.The ISME journal · 2013Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this study, we examine the temporal pattern of colony appearance during cultivation experiments, and whether this pattern could inform on optimizing the process of microbial discovery. In a series of long-term cultivation experiments, we observed an expected gradual increase over time of the total number of microbial isolates, culminating in a 700-fold colony count increase at 18 months. Conventional thought suggests that long-term incubations result in a culture collection enriched with species that are slow growing or rare, may be unavailable from short-term experiments, and likely are novel. However, after we examined the phylogenetic novelty of the isolates as a function of the time of their isolation, we found no correlation between the two. The probability of discovering either a new or rare species late in the incubation matched that of species isolated earlier. These outcomes are especially notable because of their generality: observations were essentially identical for marine and soil bacteria as well as for spore formers and non-spore formers. These findings are consistent with the idea of the stochastic awakening of dormant cells, thus lending support to the scout model. The process of microbial discovery is central to the study of environmental microorganisms and the human microbiome. While long-term incubation does not appear to increase the probability of discovering novel species, the technology enabling such incubations, i.e., single-cell cultivation, may still be the method of choice. While it does not necessarily allow more species to grow from a given inoculum, it minimizes the overall isolation effort and supplies needed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.