Soil: The key to the next generation of antimicrobials
4 June 2026
“Soil is more than dirt. Soil is a secret world at our feet, an ecosystem as diverse in life as our night sky is full of stars.”
This quote comes from the SOIL exhibition, which ran for three months in 2025 in London’s Somerset House. Soil may seem like an unusual choice to build an exhibition around, but its remarkable value is often overlooked. It is one of the world’s richest, least explored libraries of chemical innovation.
60% of all species on Earth live in the soil, making it one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet (Anthony et. al., PNAS 2023). It is an active environment where organisms across the tree of life interact, compete and shape their surroundings. At the centre of many of these processes are microbes, which produce a range of potentially valuable molecules.
This is particularly evident for antibiotics. Even as far back as 1550 BC, ancient Egyptians used ‘medicinal soil’ to treat wounds (Hutchings et. al., Curr. Opin. Microbiol. 2019). Today, 80% of antibiotics in use have been derived from compounds produced by soil microbes. In crop protection, microbe-inspired chemistry has also had major commercial impact. Strobilurins, originally inspired by natural products from fungi, are among the most important agricultural fungicide classes, and newer products such as fenpicoxamid trace back to bacterial natural products. Yet the microbes that have yielded these products represent only a small fraction of soil’s microbial diversity: the estimated 1% that can be readily cultured using traditional laboratory methods.
The remaining 99% have not been studied in depth because they are difficult or impossible to grow, or culture, using traditional methods (Lloyd et. al., mSystems 2018). We face key challenges in culturing environmental bacteria, which include:
Unknown survival requirements. Many environmental microbes need specific nutrients, energy sources, chemical signals or partner species, which may include other bacteria, fungi, archaea, plants or animals;
Complex physical microhabitats. Soil contains tiny pores, particles, surfaces and moisture gradients that create specialised niches for microbes. These physical conditions are difficult to recreate in standard lab cultures;
Varying growth rates. Many difficult-to-culture microbes grow slowly. In standard lab cultures, faster-growing species can quickly dominate, masking the presence of rarer or more delicate bacteria.
Previously inaccessible bacteria contain a vast reservoir of unexplored chemistry. Bactobio has built a distinctive, multi-pronged strategy to unlock it.
Dig
We start with carefully selected soil from agricultural land, parks and forests across the UK, and even a London garden. Headline-grabbing discovery stories often focus on microbes from exotic or extreme environments — but there is a wealth of diversity under our feet, right here in the UK. Our key differentiator is not where we dig. It is what we can recover, culture and learn from once we get there.
Learn
We have built the infrastructure to test hundreds of thousands of microbial culture conditions at scale. Our scientists relentlessly innovate to get more experimental data more efficiently, through automation, smart protocol optimisation and computational tools. Every experiment feeds into our Bactobio-built Lab App, which captures cultivation and sequencing data at scale and turns it into a reusable map of microbial growth.
Model
We use machine learning and AI-enabled tools to turn bacterial community data into predictions about microbial growth: which species are present, what they may need, and which culture conditions are most likely to enrich them. Those predictions guide the next generation of experiments, helping us target high-value bacterial groups with increasing precision. The result is a smarter discovery engine that predicts what is worth growing next.
Innovate
To reach bacteria that conventional methods miss, we look beyond culture recipes and consider the wider ecology of soil: the communities, interactions and microhabitats that shape microbial growth. We are developing strategies to modify soil communities in ways that favour promising species, analyse microbial interaction networks, and create tuneable micro-environments that better resemble natural soil habitats. Together, these approaches help us bring previously inaccessible bacteria into reach, expanding the microbial starting point for the discovery of new chemistry.
Bactobio is changing what is possible in microbial discovery. Our library now contains more than 4,000 new species, making it one of the world’s most differentiated microbial collections. By systematically exploring this collection, we are building an unparalleled understanding of microbial potential and turning it into products with impact across human health, crop protection and the planet.