Cultivating members of the microbial majority

It is with great excitement that I get to post that our manuscript on cultivating members of the microbial majority using an artificial seawater medium is finally out! This manuscript represents the hard work of not just myself, but Dr. Thrash, our undergraduates (past and present), and Austen Webber. Over the last two years, I have traveled to sites along the Gulf of Mexico collecting water for cultivation experiments (> 2000 miles traveled, > 4500 well inoculated). From the sites along the coasts of Louisiana, we have cultivated organisms from the Gulf of Mexico representing many important marine clades: SAR11, SAR116, OM43, OM252, Roseobacter, and many more. While isolating these organisms is important, it is also important to isolate organisms that represent abundant taxa within your source water. We compared OTUs from community sequencing of the source water  to our  isolate sequences to demonstrate that our method frequently captured some of the most abundant organisms in the system.

This work also represents the first instance where many of these clades were isolated from the Gulf of Mexico, and importantly, on an artificial seawater medium. While high throughput, dilution-to-extinction culturing using natural seawater has been highly successful, we hope that this new approach using artificial seawater media will help more researchers cultivate important microorganisms without the hassle of collecting large volumes of natural seawater and needing a boat.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us! We are more than willing to answer any questions you may have. You can check out our list of organisms isolated so far HERE!

Henson, Michael W., David M. Pitre, Jessica Lee Weckhorst, V. Celeste Lanclos, Austen T. Webber, and J. Cameron Thrash. (2016). Artificial seawater media facilitates cultivating members of the microbial majority from the Gulf of Mexico. mSphere 1(2). doi: 10.1128/mSphere.00028-16. (Undergraduate authors) Supplementary Information.

Some associated press became available on May 1st. Check out Becoming Acculturated, by Jeffrey M. Perkel.