Researchers at Rockefeller University have developed a groundbreaking long-read sequencing technique that bypasses traditional culturing methods to explore the vast diversity of soil microbiomes. This approach enabled assembly of hundreds of new bacterial genomes and discovery of two novel antibiotic candidates. The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, highlights soil as an immense, untapped reservoir for bioactive molecules critical to addressing antibiotic resistance. The method paves the way for scalable exploration of uncultured bacterial species crucial to drug discovery and environmental sciences.