🌱 Not farmable 🧫 Cannot grow in lab 🚫 Impossible to civilize

unculturable

9.5

Tiny living things that cannot be grown in a laboratory

adjective
/ˌʌnˈkʌltʃərəbəl/

Specialized

: no cultivable

These bacteria have proven to be unculturable using the simple and relatively inexpensive traditional plating methods and therefore have remained undetected.

Examples

Many environmental bacteria are unculturable, meaning they cannot be grown in artificial laboratory environments.
Some species of marine organisms are unculturable under standard laboratory conditions, making their study challenging.
Research indicates that certain pathogens are often unculturable, complicating efforts to understand their behavior.

Synonyms

uncultivatable

vsunculturable

Specialized

9.9

Organisms that cannot be grown in a lab using normal methods

is impossible to grow under artificial culture even with special methods

uncultivable

vsunculturable

8.6

Land that cannot grow crops

is about failure to grow under artificial culture conditions rather than field problems

Antonyms

cultured

Specialized

1 5.7

Cells, tissues, or bacteria grown in a laboratory for study

How Cultivable

culturable

Specialized

6.2

difficult

∞ 1.6

unculturable

Specialized

9.5

Surface Forms

unculturable positive

Morphology

unculturable = culturable (semi-transparent) = un + culture + able

Morphologically regular, but the lab-specific sense of 'culture' (microbiological growth) is domain-specific and may be unfamiliar to general learners.

Etymology

Unculturable comes from un- ('not'), culture ('growing' as in plants or microbes in a lab) and -able ('can'). So when scientists call a microbe unculturable, they mean it 'cannot be grown in lab conditions', which explains the laboratory meaning.