Metagenomics can improve strategies for monitoring the impact of pollutants on ecosystems and for cleaning up contaminated environments. Increased understanding of how microbial communities cope with pollutants will help assess the potential of contaminated sites to recover from pollution and increase the chances of bioaugmentation or biostimulation trials to succeed. Moreover, by providing direct access to the pool of environmental genomes without the bias of cultivation, metagenomics offers the possibility of exploring the vast diversity of degradation pathways of environmental microorganisms. This could lead to the design of more efficient customized strains/consortia for targeted use in bioremediation applications.

Further reading

• Environmental Molecular Microbiology
• Metagenomics: Theory, Methods and Applications
• Environmental Microbiology

Labels: bioremediation

Metagenomics is a rapidly growing field of research that has had a dramatic effect on the way we view and study the microbial world. By permitting the direct investigation of bacteria, viruses and fungi irrespective of their culturability and taxonomic identities, metagenomics has changed microbiological theory and methods and has also challenged the classical concept of species. This new field of biology has proven to be rich and comprehensive and is making important contributions in many areas including ecology, biodiversity, bioremediation, bioprospection of natural products, and in medicine.

from Diana Marco in Metagenomics: Theory, Methods and Applications

Labels: archaea, archaeal metagenomics, bioremediation, horizontal gene transfer, metagenomics, microbial communities, microbiome, plant-microbe interactions