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Dubilier is hardly alone in her plight. A heaping teaspoon of soil or a shot of ocean water may contain as many as one million bacterial species. Many of them are potential gold mines of chemicals and metabolites with medicinal, engineering, and energy applications. But when researchers have tried to culture these microbes in the lab, only a minority of cells form colonies. Clearly, nutrients, a carbon source, and time are usually not enough to coax bacteria isolated from the wild to grow in a laboratory setting. So what's the missing ingredient?