ReviewFrontiers in microbiology2023
Shedding light on the composition of extreme microbial dark matter: alternative approaches for culturing extremophiles.
Review in Frontiers in microbiology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 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
35 citing papers in PubMed, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Eco-technological potential of salinity-driven functional specialization in Indian solar salterns revealed by integrated culturomics and whole-metagenome profiling.BMC microbiology · 2026Article
- Genomic and evolutionary factors influencing the prediction accuracy of optimal growth temperature in prokaryotes.mSystems · 2026Article
- Unlocking Microbial Dark Matter: A Comprehensive Review of Isolation Technologies from Traditional Culturing to Single-Cell Technologies.Microorganisms · 2026Review
- Metagenomics and Metagenome-Assembled Genomes Analysis of Highland Barley Baijiu Daqu.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Extreme Arabian environments and their microbiomes: new frontiers for astrobiology and biosignature discovery.Extremophiles : life under extreme conditions · 2026Review
- Genome-mining revealed biosurfactant production capacity and gene co-occurrence patterns in diverse ecosystems.Microbial cell factories · 2026Article
- Review
- Modeling neutrophilic iron-oxidizing bacteria: a KBase narrative resource describing newly integrated metabolic reactions.Microbiology resource announcements · 2026Article
- First report of Aquitalea spp. From cave aquatic environments of Roraima Tepui, Guayana highlands.Brazilian journal of microbiology : [publication of the Brazilian Society for Microbiology] · 2026Article
- Long vs. short read sequencing for microbial ecology of sedimentary environments: a case study from Lake Arnon, Switzerland.FEMS microbiology letters · 2026Article
- Thermophilic bacteria of the Arabian Gulf and their emerging biotechnological applications: current insights and future prospects.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Culturable bacterial diversity and genome-encoded metabolic potential in Al Wahbah Crater's volcanic soils, Saudi Arabia.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Subsurface Life on Earth as a Key to Unlock Extraterrestrial Mysteries.Microbial biotechnology · 2025Review
- Article
- Salt-Adapted Microorganisms: A Promising Resource for Novel Anti-Cancer Drug Discovery.Marine drugs · 2025Review
- Phototrophic bacteria as potential probiotics for corals.npj biodiversity · 2025Review
- Bacterial Diversity of Marine Biofilm Communities in Terra Nova Bay (Antarctica) by Culture-Dependent and -Independent Approaches.Environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- A metagenomic perspective on the microbial prokaryotic genome census.Science advances · 2025Article
- Extreme smells-microbial production of volatile organic compounds at the limits of life.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2025Review
- Discovery and cultivation of prokaryotic taxa in the age of metagenomics and artificial intelligence.The ISME journal · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
More than 20,000 species of prokaryotes (less than 1% of the estimated number of Earth's microbial species) have been described thus far. However, the vast majority of microbes that inhabit extreme environments remain uncultured and this group is termed "microbial dark matter." Little is known regarding the ecological functions and biotechnological potential of these underexplored extremophiles, thus representing a vast untapped and uncharacterized biological resource. Advances in microbial cultivation approaches are key for a detailed and comprehensive characterization of the roles of these microbes in shaping the environment and, ultimately, for their biotechnological exploitation, such as for extremophile-derived bioproducts (extremozymes, secondary metabolites, CRISPR Cas systems, and pigments, among others), astrobiology, and space exploration. Additional efforts to enhance culturable diversity are required due to the challenges imposed by extreme culturing and plating conditions. In this review, we summarize methods and technologies used to recover the microbial diversity of extreme environments, while discussing the advantages and disadvantages associated with each of these approaches. Additionally, this review describes alternative culturing strategies to retrieve novel taxa with their unknown genes, metabolisms, and ecological roles, with the ultimate goal of increasing the yields of more efficient bio-based products. This review thus summarizes the strategies used to unveil the hidden diversity of the microbiome of extreme environments and discusses the directions for future studies of microbial dark matter and its potential applications in biotechnology and astrobiology.
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.