“Environmental C. difficile spores are highly transmissible for long periods after they are shed, commonly transmit within a local environment but also have the potential to spread rapidly over long distances,” the authors wrote in their paper.WIKIMEDIA, CJC2NDMicrobes thrive in nearly every Earthly environment, but surprisingly few are known to flourish when grown in labs. As a result, studies of the human gut microbiome have primarily utilized genomic approaches. By combining microbial culture experiments with genomic approaches, researchers from Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and their colleagues have now shown that, contrary to the widely held assumption that most bacteria are “unculturable,” most known gut microbial species can be grown and preserved in vitro. The results, published today (May 4) in Nature, reveal that many “unculturable” gut bacteria belong to novel groups, and nearly 60 percent of them form spores in order to survive outside the human body.
“This is really an excellent study, it covers all the bases and makes an important contribution,” said James Oliver, a professor of microbiology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who was not involved with the study.
To assess how much of the human gut microbiota could be cultured, the Sanger Institute’s Trevor Lawley and colleagues began with fresh fecal samples from six healthy individuals. The researchers sequenced the samples to identify bacterial diversity, grew bacteria from the samples on plates containing a broad-range growth medium called YCFA, and then compared the genomic data from the original samples to that from species that grew in the petri dishes. The two shared 72 percent of their genomic sequences, and sequences from the cultured bacterial colonies ...
