Most of us are aware that the weapons we rely on to fight dangerous and highly infectious bacteria are becoming increasingly ineffective. Many diseases we treated easily and quickly in the past are becoming much harder to deal with as we run out of effective antibiotics. Introducing soil: an unlikely hero. To date, the most effective antibiotic compounds have been isolated from bacteria residing within soil. However, most soil bacteria cannot be grown artificially in a lab, as they require a complex set of nutrients to survive. This is a major restriction for research involving the discovery of new antibiotic compounds. One method of solving this problem is to grow soil bacteria in their natural environment, instead of in a lab. The iChip (or isolation chip) is a device that is loaded up with soil bacteria and buried in soil, providing the bacteria with all of the nutrients they require to grow. Compared to standard lab-based culturing techniques, the iChip allows for the recovery of a wider variety of soil bacteria, many of which produce antibiotic compounds that have never been isolated before. My research focused on determining the effectiveness of the iChip and using it to expand the limited repertoire of antibiotics effective against Clostridium difficile, a species of bacteria that is rife in hospitals and causes life-threatening inflammation. My hope is that the iChip will allow microbiologists to discover many new antibiotic compounds that will aid in the battle against the global antibiotic resistance crisis.