DarkMicro – Exploring microbial dark matter with picoliter droplets

Modern sequencing techniques revealed the existence of a vast majority of microorganisms that are uncultured to date – the “microbial dark matter”. Bacteria belonging to these so-called candidate phyla (CP) often have small, reduced genomes and are likely living in symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other microorganisms. Using an innovative droplet-microfluidics platform, the project DarkMicro will analyze metabolic dependencies of CP bacteria from groundwater samples by co-cultivating them with putative hosts. The ultrahigh-throughput incubation of bacterial cultures in picoliter droplets opens new perspectives for studying the interactions in complex microbial communities and discovering the “microbial dark matter”.