Researchers at Rockefeller University have developed a long-read DNA sequencing approach that extracts large DNA fragments directly from soil. This method circumvents the need for culturing bacteria, enabling access to hundreds of previously unknown bacterial genomes from a single forest sample. Their study, published in Nature Biotechnology, has already identified two novel antibiotic leads. This scalable technology unlocks the vast untapped diversity of uncultured microbes, paving the way for new drug discovery and insights into environmental microbiomes.