Microbial life can be found in nearly every environment on earth. These tiny organisms can significantly impact their surroundings, be it deep-sea microbes influencing the ecology of the ocean floor or the human gut microbiome affecting health. Metagenomics, or the analysis of microbial DNA in different environments, has dramatically increased what is known about microbial life. These sequencing-based techniques are not dependent on culturing microbes, which can be an incredibly difficult undertaking. However, isolating and cultivating microbes remains important to both confirm and expand upon those results. Moreover, cultivated microbes could potentially be used as probiotics or biocontrol agents or for industrial purposes. To date, most environmental microbes remain uncultured, but metagenomic data can be leveraged to help researchers isolate and cultivate new ones. Specifically, metagenomics data can be used to develop new culture methods or to engineer antibodies to select microbes of interest from mixed communities. Targeted cultivation methods are complex and may rely on technology that is not readily available to all laboratories. That said, directed cultivation methods decrease the time needed to isolate and culture target microbes and could lead to new breakthroughs in capturing the uncultured majority for research or use.