[Peter-Juergen Mueller, Martin Roth, Monika Hilliger, Stephan Hilliger, Ingrid Groth, Christel Kummer, Karin Martin, Volker Schoeckh, Jose Metze, Michael Kohler, Thomas Henkel, Gunter Gastrock, Karen Lemke] DE,,Jena;DE,,Jena;DE,,Jena;DE,,Wurzburg;DE,,Jena;DE,,Cospeda;DE,,Grosslobichau;DE,,Rothenstein;DE,,Heiligenstadt;DE,,Golmsdorf;DE,,Jena;DE,,Heiligenstadt;DE,,Gottingen; The invention relates to methods for individually separating microorganisms from a suspension or culture, parallel cultivation of individual cells and analyzing the metabolic performances thereof. The invention enables basic microbial operations such as media optimization, screening according to images of novel natural substances and special metabolic performances, qualitative and quantitative detection of the effects of nutrient substrates, effectors and active substances including the media optimization and selection of microorganism clones with specific properties from large populations according to mutagenesis, transformation, transfection and genetic processing in addition to the detection of microbial contaminations to be carried out. One advantage of the invention is that it can be applied when microorganisms having outstanding properties can be respectively obtained as individual cells or individual organisms from a large population and can be characterized as pure cultures or when the effect of influencing variables can be examined in many fully comparable cultures.