Researchers at Rockefeller University harnessed terabase-scale long-read sequencing of soil metagenomes to recover hundreds of previously unknown bacterial genomes and discover new antibiotic compounds. This culture-independent approach avoids traditional lab cultivation limits, opening vast reservoirs of microbial genetic diversity for natural product discovery. The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, provides a scalable platform to mine uncultured microbes for bioactive molecules with antimicrobial potential.