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Uncultivated Microorganisms

  • Book
  • © 2009

Overview

Editors:
  1. Slava S. Epstein

    1. Dept. Biology, Northeastern University, Boston, U.S.A.

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Part of the book series: Microbiology Monographs (MICROMONO, volume 10)

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
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  2. Viable but Not Cultivable Bacteria

    • Rita R. Colwell
    Pages 121-129

  3. General Model of Microbial Uncultivability

    • Slava S. Epstein
    Pages 131-159

  4. Statistical Estimation of Uncultivated Microbial Diversity

    • J. Bunge
    Pages 160-178

  5. Detection and Characterization of Uncultivated Microorganisms Using Microarrays

    • Terry J. Gentry, Zhili He, Jizhong Zhou
    Pages 179-202

  6. Persisters, Biofilms, and the Problem of Cultivability

    • Kim Lewis
    Pages 203-216

  7. Metagenomics and Antibiotic Discovery from Uncultivated Bacteria

    • Vivian Miao, Julian Davies
    Pages 217-236

  8. Taking the Concept to the Limit: Uncultivable Bacteria and Astrobiology

    • Kenneth Nealson
    Pages 237-240

  9. Single Cell Whole Genome Amplification of Uncultivated Organisms

    • Mircea Podar, Martin Keller, Philip Hugenholtz
    Pages 241-256

  10. Physiological and Ecological Adaptations of Slow-Growing, Heterotrophic Microbes and Consequences for Cultivation

    • Thomas M. Schmidt, Allan E. Konopka
    Pages 257-276

  11. Characterizing Microbial Population Structures through Massively Parallel Sequencing

    • Mitchell L. Sogin
    Pages 278-292

  12. The Seabed as Natural Laboratory: Lessons From Uncultivated Methanotrophs

    • Antje Boetius, Thomas Holler, Katrin Knittel, Janine Felden, Frank Wenzhöfer
    Pages 293-316

  13. Back Matter

    Pages 205-208
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Keywords

About this book

In 1898, an Austrian microbiologist Heinrich Winterberg made a curious observation: the number of microbial cells in his samples did not match the number of colonies formed on nutrient media (Winterberg 1898). About a decade later, J. Amann qu- tified this mismatch, which turned out to be surprisingly large, with non-growing cells outnumbering the cultivable ones almost 150 times (Amann 1911). These papers signify some of the earliest steps towards the discovery of an important phenomenon known today as the Great Plate Count Anomaly (Staley and Konopka 1985). Note how early in the history of microbiology these steps were taken. Detecting the Anomaly almost certainly required the Plate. If so, then the period from 1881 to 1887, the years when Robert Koch and Petri introduced their key inventions (Koch 1881; Petri 1887), sets the earliest boundary for the discovery, which is remarkably close to the 1898 observations by H. Winterberg. Celebrating its 111th anniversary, the Great Plate Count Anomaly today is arguably the oldest unresolved microbiological phenomenon. In the years to follow, the Anomaly was repeatedly confirmed by all microb- logists who cared to compare the cell count in the inoculum to the colony count in the Petri dish (cf., Cholodny 1929; Butkevich 1932; Butkevich and Butkevich 1936). By mid-century, the remarkable difference between the two counts became a universally recognized phenomenon, acknowledged by several classics of the time (Waksman and Hotchkiss 1937; ZoBell 1946; Jannasch and Jones 1959).

Editors and Affiliations

  • Dept. Biology, Northeastern University, Boston, U.S.A.

    Slava S. Epstein

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