How do we know that there are unculturable bacteria?
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The first evidence that not all bacteria from a given environment will grow on laboratory media came from microscopy; the number of cells that were observed microscopically far outweighed the number of colonies that grow on a petri plate (2). Given the name “The Great Plate Count Anomaly,” the magnitude of the anomaly varied by environment but could reach several orders of magnitude (77). While stimulating culturing efforts, this observation also raised the question of the phylogenetic identity of these bacteria that do not grow in the laboratory. It was proposed that these are dead cells and therefore would never grow, potentially explaining the anomaly without introducing novel taxa of unculturable bacteria .
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The first evidence that not all bacteria from a given environment will grow on laboratory media came from microscopy; the number of cells that were observed microscopically far outweighed the number of colonies that grow on a petri plate (2). Given the name “The Great Plate Count Anomaly,” the magnitude of the anomaly varied by environment but could reach several orders of magnitude (77). While stimulating culturing efforts, this observation also raised the question of the phylogenetic identity of these bacteria that do not grow in the laboratory. It was proposed that these are dead cells and therefore would never grow, potentially explaining the anomaly without introducing novel taxa of unculturable bacteria (76). In fact, many of these cells were shown to be metabolically active, even though they could not replicate on laboratory media (68). Additional evidence for the presence of bacterial taxa that cannot be grown in the laboratory came from molecular tools
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