12 - Metagenomics approach for bioremediation: challenges and perspectives

Abstract

With an increasing population density, destruction of natural resources, and industrialization producing more contaminants or pollutants in the environments, the contaminants create trouble for living organisms. Bioagumentation-based bioremediation is one of the most effective ways for treatment of waste materials. But, selection of potent microbes and screening of important genes constructed from the groups of microorganisms, again are a challenging task using classical or conventional microbiology (culture-based) technique. However, in the current genomic era, we have powerful metagenomics molecular approaches to resolve these problems. Because a metagenomics approach is a culture-independent and development in DNA sequencing technology, it is helpful for rapid analysis of any sample. In addition, nucleotide databases and in silico tools, advance the analysis and are extremely helpful to understand the involvement of microbes in the degradation of pollutants or screening of novel genes which is associated with bioremediation.