Introduction to High-Throughput Sequencing Technologies and Review of its Application in Bioleaching

Abstract

Over the past years, the traditional cultivation-independent genomic approaches which rely on the preexisting knowledge about gene sequence, have significantly promoted our understanding of the structural and functional diversity of bioleaching microorganisms in extremely acidic environments. However, high-throughput sequencing technology as a comprehensive and rapid method is now being ported to bioleaching systems for microbial community and gene expression analysis. Years of research have demonstrated that high-throughput sequencing technology has the potential to dramatically accelerate biological research, by enabling the comprehensive analysis of genomes and transcriptomes. This paper aims to introduce the high-throughput sequencing methodology, particularly focusing on the application of high-throughput sequencing technology on bioleaching microorganisms and the challenges associated with its applications.