🚀 go-pugleaf

Lou Scheffer's notion of a bacteria-based DES key search machine brought
to mind a section of E. O. Wilson's new book, "The Diversity of Life."
Here's a paragraph or two from p. 143 ff. . . .

    Jostein Goks0yr and Vigdis Torsvik went in search of silent bacterial
  species in a natural environment.  They chose to cut the Gordian knot
  of selective culturing by separating and comparing the DNA of the
  bacteria directly.  They took small quantities of soil from a Norwegian
  beech forest near their laboratory.  Using a succession of steps in
  extraction and centrifugation, they separated the bacteria from the
  soil and removed and purified the DNA of these organisms in a single
  common batch.  They employed extreme high pressure to shear the
  double-stranded DNA molecules into fragments of uniform size.  When
  heated, DNA molecules separate into their constituent single strands . . .

    When cooled to about 25 oC below the melting temperature, the DNA
  strands are easily brought together to form a double helix; they are
  "annealed," as the molecular biologists say.  The higher the concentration
  of complementary strands in a solution, the faster the annealing will
  occur.  If there are mixes of different species and strains of species,
  like those in the Norwegian soil bacteria, the concentration of single
  strands will be much lower than is the case when DNA from only one
  species is present; the annealing process willbe slowed to a corresponding
  degree . . .

  [A]cross all the forests and habitats for the entire world . . . we might
  expect to find many millions of hitherto unstudied species.  The bacteria
  await biologists as the black hole of taxonomy.  Few scientists have
  even tried to dream of how all that diversity can be assayed and used.

Wilson's reference for this is two articles by Goks0yr, et al., Applied
and Environmental Microbiology, 56:776-781 and 782-787 (1990).