Recent trends in characterization of microbial diversity from environment: A review

Abstract

Microorganisms find application in all spheres of life: agriculture, food, medicines, brewing and baking industry etc. But, until now only 1 per cent of the microorganisms are characterized. This has been performed through the culture dependent and culture independent methods. The omics based approaches viz. metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metaproteomics provide better understanding of genes from microbial community and diverse ecosystem. These recent advances leads to development of characterization methods which are rapid, sensitive detect the pico amount of sample and will leads to identification of the microorganisms up to species level. Metagenomics and gene mining tools are the culture independent approach that has implication for finding novel organism with unique metabolic potential and leads to identification of the microbial strains that has potential to be utilized at the industry level. This review is an attempt to describe the recent advances in technology for the microbial diversity analysis from diverse habitats and to understand the microorganisms involved in various microbial processes.