EDITORIAL article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Evolutionary and Genomic Microbiology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1604849
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring the Diversity, Ecological Significance, and Systematics of Uncultivated Prokaryotic TaxaView all 8 articles
Editorial: Exploring the Diversity, Ecological Significance, and Systematics of Uncultivated Prokaryotic Taxa
Provisionally accepted
- 1Carthage University, Tunis, Tunisia
- 2University of New Hampshire, Durham, North Carolina, United States
- 3Department of Microbiology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, Canada, Canada
- 4CEA, INRAE, SPI, 30200 Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France, Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France
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these organisms exist, along with their potential predisposition for cultivation using conventional methods, have made the study of these uncultivated prokaryotes a critical frontier in microbiology, unveiling extensive and previously unexplored microbial diversity (Rinke et al., 2013;Huber et al., 2007;Parks et al., 2017;Lloyd et al., 2018). Despite significant challenges, recent advancements in omics technologies have provided invaluable insights into the ecological roles, systematics, and metabolic capacities of these elusive microorganisms (Garza and Dutilh, 2015;Lewis et al. 2021). Traditionally, many prokaryotes have been considered difficult or even impossible to culture using conventional methods, discouraging many microbiologists from studying them and leaving much of the microbial diversity undiscovered. However, innovative approaches leveraging metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and single-cell amplified genomes (SAGs) are now shedding light on their biology, potentially guiding the development of tailored cultivation strategies and challenging the longheld paradigm of 'uncultivability.' These techniques significantly broaden our understanding of microbial diversity, ecological interactions and roles, and evolutionary history (Gutleben et al., 2018;Lewis and Ettema, 2019;Lewis et al., 2021;Xie et al., 2021;Liu et al., 2022;Laugier, 2023). Coupled with innovative culturing techniques such as co-cultivation strategies, microfluidics, and synthetic biology, these developments are establishing culturomics as a valuable complement to omics-based studies. Further pushing the boundaries of microbial discovery is essential for unraveling the functioning of complex microbial communities that have long been unknown or have evaded traditional cultivation methods (Lagier et al., 2012; The seven studies presented in this topic highlight roles of uncultivated
Keywords: uncultivated, Bacteria, Archaea, omics, SeqCode, Candidatus, taxogenomics
Received: 03 Apr 2025; Accepted: 17 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gtari, Tisa, Palmer and ARMENGAUD. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Maher Gtari, Carthage University, Tunis, Tunisia
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