Microbial dark matter
Microbial dark matter comprises the vast majority of microbial organisms that biologists are unable to culture in lab due to lack of knowledge or ability to supply the required growth conditions. Microbial dark matter is unrelated to the dark matter of physics and cosmology, but is so-called for the difficulty in effectively studying it as a result of its inability to be cultured by current methods. It is hard to estimate its relative magnitude, but the accepted gross estimate is that less than one percent of microbial species in a given ecological niche is culturable. In recent years effort is being put to decipher more of the microbial dark matter by means of learning their genome DNA sequence from environmental samples and then by gaining insights to their metabolism from their sequenced genome, promoting the knowledge required for their cultivation.
