Transcriptomics, proteomics and interactomics: unique approaches to track the insights of bioremediation

Abstract

Microbial mediated bioremediation has a great potential to effectively restore contaminated environment, but the lack of information about factors regulating the growth and metabolism of various microbial communities in polluted environment often limits its implementation. Newly seeded techniques such as transcriptomics, proteomics and interactomics offer remarkable promise as tools to address longstanding questions regarding the molecular mechanisms involved in the control of mineralization pathways. During mineralization, transcript structures and their expression have been studied using high-throughput transcriptomic techniques with microarrays. Generally however, transcripts have no ability to operate any physiological response; rather, they must be translated into proteins with significant functional impact. These proteins can be identified by proteomic techniques using powerful two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2-DE). Towards the establishment of functional proteomics, the current advances in mass spectrometry (MS) and protein microarrays play a central role in the proteomics approach. Exploring the differential expression of a wide variety of proteins and screening of the entire genome for proteins that interact with particular mineralization regulatory factors would help us to gain insights into bioremediation.