Artificial Seawater Media Facilitate Cultivating Members of the Microbial Majority from the Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

The difficulty in cultivating many microbial taxa vexes researchers intent on understanding the contributions of these organisms to natural systems, particularly when these organisms are numerically abundant, and many cultivation attempts recover only rare taxa. Efforts to improve this conundrum with marine bacterioplankton have been successful with natural seawater media, but that approach suffers from a number of drawbacks and there have been no comparable artificial alternatives created in the laboratory. This work demonstrates that a newly developed suite of artificial seawater media can successfully cultivate many of the most abundant taxa from seawater samples and many taxa previously only cultivated with natural seawater media. This methodology therefore significantly simplifies efforts to cultivate bacterioplankton and greatly improves our ability to perform physiological characterization of cultures postisolation.