[Approaches for increasing the culturability of microorganisms]

Only a tiny amount of microorganisms on the earth can be cultured so far, which seriously obstructs the investigation into principles of microbial activities and exploiting microbial resources. To improve the culturing methods and to develop novel culturing techniques is therefore very important to increase the culturabilty of microorganisms and to isolate more uncultured microorganisms, which is of crucial importance to research principles of microbial life, to understand the interaction between microbial cells for correctly designing, applying and manipulating environmental microbial processes. This review systematically summarized the causes for microorganisms' unculturability and recent work on the approaches to increase the culturability of microorganisms. To mimic natural environment (physically, chemically and biologically) and to introduce microbial interactions into culture medium as many as possible is suggested to be of key importance to increase culturability of microorganisms.