High-throughput single-cell isolation of <i>Bifidobacterium</i> strains from the human gut microbiome

The field of high-throughput microbial culturomics is still in its early stages. Enhancing our ability to isolate and phenotypically test bacterial strains from complex communities is crucial for advancing microbiome research and healthcare development. Given the time and cost inefficiencies of traditional culturing methods, a more efficient, high-throughput approach to obtain isolates is needed. In the present study, we assessed a single-cell dispensing platform and developed a workflow to isolate diverse <i>Bifidobacterium</i> strains from fecal samples. We demonstrated here the capability of this novel technology to efficiently obtain hundreds of isolates of a targeted group, covering both species and strain diversities. This generalizable and scalable method can potentially allow for the high-throughput recovery of microbes from other taxonomic groups, providing a fundamental step in improving the culturomics framework to complement metagenomic approaches and enable isolate-level functional studies of important microbes.