Two-Dimensional Cell Separation: a High-Throughput Approach to Enhance the Culturability of Bacterial Cells from Environmental Samples

In the manuscript, we have developed a novel yet simple and innovative approach to improving the cultivability of natural microorganisms without sophisticated instrumentation. The method used gradient centrifugation combined with serial dilution (two-dimensional cell separation) to improve taxum recovery from samples. This simple and robust protocol can be modified for any environment and culture medium and provides access to untapped microbial diversity. This approach can be incorporated with less labor and complexity in laboratories with minimal instrumentation. As cultivation is a workflow that is well suited to lower-resource microbiology labs, we believe improvements in cultivability can increase opportunities for scientific collaborations between low-resource labs and groups focused on high-resource cultivation-independent methodologies.