Cultivable

Cultivable is an adjective used to describe organisms, tissues, or materials that can be grown or propagated under laboratory, greenhouse, or field conditions. In microbiology and related life sciences, a microorganism is said to be cultivable if it can be maintained as a stable culture on or in artificial media under defined environmental parameters, such as temperature, pH, nutrients, and oxygen availability. Cultivability is a practical constraint that shapes experimental design and interpretation, because only a subset of organisms present in a sample may be recovered using standard culture techniques.

Not all microorganisms are cultivable with current methods; many are termed unculturable or not-yet-cultivable because they require specific, often unknown, growth factors or symbiotic relationships. Advances in culture methods, such as enriched media, co-culture, and simulated natural environments, gradually expand the cultivable fraction; culture-independent approaches like metagenomics reveal diversity beyond what is cultivable.

In agriculture and botany, cultivable can describe species or varieties that can be reasonably grown and propagated by humans under agricultural practices. A field or land described as cultivable refers to its suitability for crop production, potentially overlapping with arable land, though cultivability may depend on climate, soil, water, and management.

The term is relative and context dependent; a species may be cultivable in one region or under certain techniques but not globally. It is often used in contrast to wild, undomesticated, or uncultured organisms.

Overall, cultivable indicates the practical ability to produce and maintain a population under controlled conditions, with the acknowledgment that this capability varies by organism and method.