Recently, the research results titled "Metatranscriptomic and comparative genomic insights into resuscitation mechanisms during enrichment culturing" is published on Microbiome(IF=9.133). This work is finished independently by the State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology, Institute of Microbial Technology, Shandong University. Professor Du Zongjun is the corresponding author and associate professor Mu Dashuai is the first author of this paper.

The pure culture of prokaryotes remains essential to elucidating the role of these organisms. Scientists have reasoned that hard to cultivate microorganisms might grow in pure culture if provided with the chemical components of their natural environment. However, most microbial species in the biosphere that would otherwise be "culturable" may fail to grow because of their growth state in nature, such as dormancy.That means even if scientist would provide microorganisms with the natural environment, such dormant microorganisms probably still remain in a dormant state.

In this work,an enrichment culture system for high-efficiency isolation of uncultured strains from marine sediment was constructed. Degree of enrichment analysis, dormant and active taxa calculation, viable but non-culturable bacteria resuscitation analysis, combined with metatranscriptomic and comparative genomic analyses of the interactions between microbial communications during enrichment culture showed that the so-called enrichment method could culture the "uncultured" not only through enriching the abundance of "uncultured", but also through the resuscitation mechanism. In addition, the enrichment culture was a complicated mixed culture system, which contains the competition, cooperation, or coordination among bacterial communities, compared with pure cultures. This study provides a new train of thought to mining marine microbial dark matter based on mixed cultures.

Professor Du Zongjun's group focus on culturing the uncultured marine bacteria for an extended period, and they studied deeply about the culture methods and microbial systems biology. As a result, a series of deep branches of taxonomic bacteria have been isolated and cultured. The above research is supported from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology, Shandong University.

Written by: Mu Dashuai