“…Considering that 1 g of soil may harbor 10 3 -10 6 bacterial species (Torsvik et al, 1990;Curtis et al, 2002;Gans et al, 2005;Roesch et al, 2007), the vast majority would remain undetected. Community richness estimations in fact indicated that most of the diversity in the environment is due to rare members (Hughes et al, 2001;Reeder and Knight, 2009) and these may also have important ecological functions, for example, in cycling of elements, as a supplier of phytohormones or as phytopathogens (Karadeniz et al, 2006;Humbert et al, 2010;Pester et al, 2010;Roper, 2011;Krzmarzick et al, 2012).…”