Environmental organisms are extremely diverse and only a small fraction has been successfully cultured in the laboratory. Culture in micro wells provides a method for rapid screening of a wide variety of growth conditions and commercially available plates contain a large number of substrates, nutrient sources, and inhibitors, which can provide an assessment of the phenotype of an organism. This review describes applications of phenotype arrays to anaerobic and thermophilic microorganisms, use of the plates in stress response studies, in development of culture media for newly discovered strains, and for assessment of phenotype of environmental communities. Also discussed are considerations and challenges in data interpretation and visualization, including data normalization, statistics, and curve fitting.
Highlights
► Phenotypic screening rapidly assesses a wide range of growth conditions. ► Growth assays can be adapted for anaerobic and extremophile growth conditions. ► Phenotypic arrays assess substrate utilization in environmental communities. ► Cluster heatmaps are effective in computing and visualizing PM data. ► Improved results are obtained through parametric curves rather than summary values.
