The "comfort timing" strategy: a potential pathway for the cultivation of uncultured microorganisms and a possible adaptation for environmental colonisation.

Efforts to isolate uncultured microorganisms over the last century and a half, as well as the advanced 'omics' technologies developed over the last three decades, have greatly increased the knowledge and resources of microbiology. However, many cellular functions such as growth remain unknown in most of the microbial diversity identified through genomic sequences from environmental samples, as evidenced by the increasingly precise observations of the phenomenon known as the 'great plate count anomaly'. Faced with the many microbial cells recalcitrant to cultivation present in environmental samples, Epstein proposed the 'scout' model, characterised by a dominance of dormant cells whose awakening would be strictly stochastic.