New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil
Most bacteria cannot be cultured in the lab—and that’s been bad news for medicine. Many of our frontline antibiotics originated from microbes, yet as antibiotic resistance spreads and drug pipelines run dry, the soil beneath our feet has a vast hidden reservoir of untapped lifesaving compounds. Now, researchers have developed a way to access this microbial goldmine. Their approach, published in Nature Biotechnology, circumvents the need to grow bacteria in the lab by extracting very large DNA f