“Omics” Technologies in Biodegradation Processes

Abstract

The considerable environmental impact of pollution due to human activities is driving the development of new decontamination and clean-up methods. Hereby, the interactions between the various microbial communities at polluted sites is receiving increased research attention, with the novel omics approaches, opening up new ways to study bioremediation pathways and their mechanisms. This has allowed innovation in the field of new bioremediation as an effective way to combat pollution. In particular, the omics approaches offer great potential to predict the metabolic processes of microbes in environments experiencing pollution. The high-performance analyses provided by these approaches can, amongst others, help track novel organisms for use in bioremediation and offer new, high-quality insights into those molecular pathways that are critical to biodegradation. In short, through multi-omics approaches, the field of bioremediation will benefit from the establishment of new theory-based methodologies to mitigate pollution.