‘Omics’ Tools in Soil Microbiology: The State of the Art

Abstract

The soil being the most heterogeneous substance hosts the dynamic environments for diverse microorganisms. Traditional techniques are limited to explore only few portion of massive unknown soil microbial world due to their well-known biasness in detecting microbial genetics and functional diversity. With this respect, omics targets the powerful genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomic tools to explore the vast microbial community, new biomolecules and novel pathways. It helps to better understand the toxicity mechanisms, predicts the risks associated with environmental toxicity and aids in bioprospecting of value-added products. These new approaches will be useful to establish the linkage between structure and function of soil microbial community and help to get better insight of the ecological processes in the environment with special emphasis on plant-microbe ecosystems. The present chapter will give an overview of the application of the advanced molecular tools as well as their potentials and limitations in studying the soil microbial ecology.