They’re usually only observable in the rare case that they get randomly captured on an electron microscope slide. The genomic method is complicated because there’s so much data it’s hard to extract the signal and reassemble the snippets. There’s already more data than we know what to do with.
That said, recently a fellow HNer used the genomic method on old data and may have discovered a new class of life one step down from viruses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42547489
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_dark_matter
They’re usually only observable in the rare case that they get randomly captured on an electron microscope slide. The genomic method is complicated because there’s so much data it’s hard to extract the signal and reassemble the snippets. There’s already more data than we know what to do with.
That said, recently a fellow HNer used the genomic method on old data and may have discovered a new class of life one step down from viruses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42547489