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Paper short abstract

We explore the relations between molecular and bacteriological microbiology through the lens of “cultures of culturing” and “cultures without culturing.” We argue that microbiology is characterised by differentiated evidentiary pluralism that position molecular microbiology as perpetually new.

Paper long abstract

Molecular microbiology has been a rapidly developing field since the 1930s. However, molecular-based techniques aimed at substituting culture-based practices of bacteriological microbiology remain to be framed as novel, emerging and insufficiently trustworthy. We examine the relations between the molecular and bacteriological microbiology through the lens of “cultures of culturing” and their emerging counterpart: “cultures without culturing.” Pure culture as a technical procedure and an epistemic ideal is stabilised in classical microbiology. To culture a microorganism is to render it visible, controllable, and demonstrable. The rise of molecular phylogenetics and environmental sequencing destabilised this evidentiary regime. Through genetic analysis, microbiologists described vast microbial lineages without cultured representatives. These developments have generated what we term “cultures without culturing”: epistemic formations in which phylogenetic placement, and ecological recurrence operate as sufficient warrants for microbial existence. Yet, this epistemic foundation of molecular microbiology, despite, for instance, offering faster methods of bacterial identification and clinical diagnostics, is often framed as novel and epistemically inferior to classic cultures.

Drawing on discourse analysis of publicly available sources (including methodological and review papers, editorials in leading microbiology journals, and e.g. debates surrounding Candidatus taxa) we analyse how evidentiary authority is constructed across culture-based and molecular approaches. We argue that contemporary microbiology is characterised not by a simple culture-to-molecular paradigm shift but by differentiated evidentiary pluralism. We show how cultures of culturing have established enduring epistemic frame with knowledge and technologies coming out of cultures without culturing being seen as perpetually new, and thus perpetually requiring demonstrations of trustworthiness.