Rockefeller University -- A teaspoon of dirt contains an estimated 10,000 species of bacteria, but it’s only one percent of these microbial bugs — the ones that can be grown easily in a lab — that have brought us antibiotics, anticancer agents and other useful drugs. The odds favor the other 99 percent for clinical promise, too, but scientists have had little success in tapping this unknown majority for new medicines because of the difficulty of analyzing the bugs’ DNA.
