De novo Assembly Vastly Expands the Known Microbial Universe

The study of the human microbiome relies heavily on the genomes of bacterial isolates that can be grown in culture. A recent study (Pasolli et al. Cell 2019;176:649–662) of stool microbiome samples generated over 150 000 microbial genomes without any culture, vastly expanding our knowledge of the biases in existing reference databases