Metagenomics: Access to Unculturable Microbes in the Environment

Abstract

More than 99% of the microbes that exist in the environment can not be cultivated easily. Thus, most of the microbes in the environment have not been described and accessed for biotechnology or basic research. Metagenomics, which is the culture-independent genomic analysis of the microbial community, attempts to overcome these difficulties. This technology has the potential for providing insight into the functional dimensions of environmental genomic datasets and will help to achieve a major goal of environmental microbiology, the complexities of microbial community function and interaction among these microbes. This article gives an overview of the current knowledge of metagenomic technologies and presents examples of studies that have used these techniques. Furthermore, future technologies related to understanding the metagenome are discussed.