Decoding Complex Soil Microbial Communities through New Age "Omics"

Abstract

Omics employs a suite of high-throughput techniques coupled with robust computational analysis to extract every aspect of information from microbial communities, thus giving access to their genome, metagenome, transcriptome, proteome and metabolome. Over the past 5-10 years omics has revolutionized the field of microbial ecology and diversity by overcoming several challenges associated with isolation and characterization of unknown microorganisms from different environments. With increasing technological advancements omics is growing rapidly by incorporating newer areas of study like metabolomics and culturomics and could be referred as new age omics. New age omics package involves unparallel techniques of detection and analysis that could be employed to study soil microbiota, which was once considered as a challenging task. Present review summarizes chronological scientific discoveries that contributed towards study of soil microorganisms and familiarizes with omics methodologies and its importance in soil microbial ecology.