2017 Volume 71 Issue 1 Pages 2-
Abstract: Modern microbiology has been developed based upon cultivation of organisms in pure culture. Cultivation of organisms on solidified media brought about a revolution in microbiology in 1890’s but it did not take long to find a clear limitation of this strategy, which is often referred to as “great plate count anomaly”, a disparity between total cell counts and culturable cells counts on plates in environmental samples. Recent massive DNA sequencing technology allows to construct genomes of yet-to-be cultured organisms in silico, thus microbiologists can circumvent time-consuming and laborious isolation works. Nonetheless, what genome sequencing tells us is always speculative, and it never shows us the entity and the way of living in a vital way without having pure culture and cultivation-dependent studies. Here I overview the limitation of culturing organisms and issues behind it. I am also emphasizing that gelling agents and the way of medium preparation are crucial factors affecting the culturability of microorganisms.
