Microbial metagenomics for industrial and environmental bioprospecting: The unknown envoy

Abstract

Microorganisms grown as laboratory strains have been the starting approach for the discovery of various industrially viable molecules now in use. Metagenomics, which exploits culture-independent approach to access the combined genomes of environmental microbial populations, offers a resource of exploring the microbial metabolites derived from the large pool of microorganisms that are known to exist in the environment but remain obstinate to laboratory culturing. Highly specific, tailor-made, novel microbial metabolites have been obtained using metagenomic methods for industrial and environmental sustainability. The application of microbial metagenomics is not limited to the population ecology but can also have huge scope for pharmaceutical and environmental sustainability. Thus, now the analysis in the real time about the expression of the particular gene is to be studied for the activity, efficacy, consistency and specificity. Combined exertions linking researchers from diverse fields comprising microbial genetics, genomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology will be expected to be essential to the commendable potential of these unknown envoys for a sustainable future. The current developments in microbial metagenomics to the discovery of industrial important molecules will be discussed in the current book chapter.