When I was a graduate student, I did a rotation in a tuberculosis lab. Mycobacterium tuberculosis and research strains grow very slowly; one round of cell division can take nearly a day. E. coli can divide every 20 minutes, meaning that in the time it takes to grow two M. tuberculosis from one, you can get ten trillion E. coli. Since my rotation was only a couple of months, I was given an E. coli research project. And M. tuberculosis is still among the relatively small proportion of bacterial species that we can actually grow in the lab at all. Given all of that, I have a lot of respect for the Japanese team that spent 12 years culturing organisms from a group called Lokiarchaea. Imagine being a grad student in that lab.
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