Applications of metagenomics in microbial bioremediation of pollutants: from genomics to environmental cleanup

Bharagava, Ram Naresh ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1092-4181, Purchase, Diane ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8071-4385, Saxena, Gaurav and Mulla, Sikandar I. (2018) Applications of metagenomics in microbial bioremediation of pollutants: from genomics to environmental cleanup. In: Microbial Diversity in the Genomic Era. Das, Surajit and Dash, Hirak Ranjan, eds. Elsevier | Academic Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 459-477. ISBN 9780128148495. [Book Section] (doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-814849-5.00026-5)

Abstract

Environmental pollutants are of serious ecotoxicological and health concern worldwide. To cope with these, bioremediation technologies utilizing microorganisms is currently viewed as an excellent cost-effective and ecofriendly strategy for the environmental management. However, a strategic execution of the bioremediation technology requires the knowledge of microbial metabolism, key enzymes, and genes involved and nature, dynamics, and composition of microbial communities, which can be easily understood by applying molecular techniques. Conventional or culture-dependent molecular techniques are currently being applied to characterize the potential pollutants degrading/detoxifying microbes, but these techniques are sometimes biased and do not actually provide the accurate information. However, the currently emerging metagenomic approaches including next-generation sequencing technologies can provide the reliable information and reveal very useful information about the metagenome of environmental microorganisms, which play an important role in the biogeochemical cycles and degradation and detoxification of environmental pollutants using culture-independent molecular techniques. Therefore, this chapter provides an overview of the metagenomic approaches and their applications in microbial ecology and bioremediation.

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