Methods in Metagenomics and Environmental Biotechnology

Abstract

Microbes are integral part of our environment. They have enormous industrial and medicinal applications. Even they play a crucial role during digestion where they are present in the form of gut flora. Genomic sequences are a prerequisite for molecular taxonomic characterization of novel microbes, and traditional microbiology is dependent on clone cultures for DNA extraction of a specific microbe population. As a result vast varieties of species are missed since most of the microbes cannot be cultured in laboratory conditions. Metagenomics skips the requirement of culturing the microbes in lab as it studies genetic material which is directly taken from environmental samples.