Functional Metagenomics

Abstract At the dawn of this millennium microbiologists unfurled the new era in genomics and it is now perceived as “metagenomics.” Over the years workers in metagenomics have made astonishing discoveries in microbial taxonomy; concurrently functional capabilities have revealed new aspects of various biomes. Conventionally, metagenomics researchers have revealed various novel bioactive compounds by constructing libraries of environmental DNA of variable inserts in suitable vectors. Although it has been a good alternative to trap the potentiality of uncultivable microbes, one of the mammoth tasks is the screening of millions of clones. Functional metagenomics has supplied another innovative breakthrough in high-throughput sequencing. Through massive parallel direct sequencing of the collective genome from a particular biome, we have gained significant insight into the potential functions of microbial communities of individual niches. By integrating other “omics” technologies (metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, metabolomics, interactomics) with bioinformatics tools, functional metagenomics can identify the individual traits employed by microbes that vary across time and space for their survival.