The mission of UNLOCK is to unlock new microbial potential. Why and – more importantly – how do we want to accomplish this? In a series of blogs, we compare our mission with team play in sports: Why would you only focus on individual star players? In this first part, we explain why team play is key. Let’s discover new talents and make a dream team!
By the UNLOCK team / May 23, 2022
KEY MESSAGES
- Microbes are everywhere, but only 1% of their talent has been discovered so far.
- Microbes are natural team players, so it’s key to look for microbial talent in the context of the whole community or team.
- What kind of talents we’re looking for, depends on the goal of the team. The composition of the team will vary, but the steps to compose such a team can be the same across teams.
- Let’s UNLOCK Microbial Potential together!
Team play is key
The key to the right team
What kind of microbial talents you’re searching for, depends on the goal of the team. A soccer coach is looking for different types of talents than the coach of a cycling team. In the same way, a scientist aiming to find a microbial team to improve gut health searches for different microbes than a scientist looking for a microbial team meant to clean wastewater. The approach, however, can be similar.

Ways to identify new talents
- The discovery of microbial new talents under very specific conditions – in a high-throughput manner – with the Biodiscovery Platform. Go directly to the blog via this link.
- Compare the performance of a team under different conditions with the Parallel Cultivation Platform. Read the blog here.
- Mixing and matching teams with the Modular Bioreactor Platform
- Performing (data) analysis of the team composition and potential in transparently and uniformly with the FAIR Data Platform. Go directly to this blog to learn more.
References
- Figure 1 was created by Microbiome Support and is available in different languages on their website.
- Jörg Overmann, Birte Abt, and Johannes Sikorski. Present and Future of Culturing Bacteria in Annual Review of Microbiology (2017), 71:711–30
You can read more about our mission under Explore.
- Lead image based on photo by CDC on Unsplash.