Cultivating the uncultured: Harnessing the "sandwich agar plate" approach to isolate heme-dependent bacteria from marine sediment.

In the classical microbial isolation technique, the isolation process inevitably destroys all microbial interactions and thus makes it difficult to culture the many microorganisms that rely on these interactions for survival. In this study, we designed a simple coculture technique named the "sandwich agar plate method," which maintains microbial interactions throughout the isolation and pure culture processes. The total yield of uncultured species in sandwich agar plates based on eight helper strains was almost 10-fold that of the control group.