Ask any microbiologist how to characterize an organism, and how to sequence its genome.
One finds a suitable media to propagate the beast in the lab, grows up a "clone" (the progeny from a single founder) or a "colony" extracts DNA and ... whalla.
Suitable media.
It has been known for some time (since the microscope I imagine) that if I take a bit of soil, put it on a microscope slide, that I might see 100 beasts. When placing them on every variety of media I can come up with, out of those 100, 5 will grow.
Microbiologists have freezers full of thousands and thousands of bugs .... representatives of the 5% they can grow.
Modern DNA sequencing technology allows one to take that scoop of dirt and put the whole thing into sequencing without any effort to grow it in the lab. The computer can make the assemblies. Had I tossed War and Piece in with the Encyclopedia earlier, the computer would sort it out as a discrete "contig".
So, we can now assemble genomes of thousands of organisms, things we cannot grow and have never met, from a spoonful of dirt.
Lots of bugs need each other ("microbial consortia"), the degree of their symbiosis/commnensualism defeating our efforts to isolate pure strains.
There are literally thousands of published solved microbial genomes, all from the 5%.
The 95% are only just now under the knife.
Crazy.
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