We demonstrate that highly parallelized in-droplet cultivation starting from single cells results in the cultivation of yet uncultured species and a significantly higher bacterial diversity than standard agar plate cultivation. Here, we introduce a droplet-based microscale cultivation system, which is directly coupled to a high-throughput screening for antimicrobial activity prior to strain isolation. By increasing (i) throughput and (ii) sensitivity by miniaturization, we innovate microbiological cultivation to comply with biological stochasticity. But conventional methods are limited to low throughput. Culturing recalcitrant bacteria is a stochastic process.
But with resistance formation, these compounds become increasingly ineffective, while the majority of microbial and with that chemical compound diversity remains inaccessible for cultivation and exploration. Antibiotics from few culturable microorganisms have saved millions of lives since the 20th century.
