Rockefeller University scientists leveraged terabase-scale long-read sequencing of soil metagenomes to reconstruct hundreds of complete bacterial genomes from uncultivated microbes, leading to discovery of new antibiotic candidates. This approach overcomes cultivation barriers and unlocks soil's vast microbial diversity, potentially expanding drug pipelines and illuminating microbial ecology. The advance offers scalable methods to tap unculturable bacteria as a reservoir of bioactive molecules crucial for antibiotic development amidst growing resistance.