Abstract
Conventional culture-based techniques are imperative in investigating the microbial ecology of natural and anthropogenically impacted environments, but they are tremendously prejudiced and unfair in their evaluation of microbial genetic assortment by selecting a specific inhabitant of microbes. Due to current progresses in genomics and sequencing methodologies, microbial community studies using culture nondependent molecular procedures have begun a new epoch of microbial ecology. Molecular studies of ecological communities have discovered that cultivable microbial segment represents <1 % of whole number of prokaryotic species existing in any sample. Various molecular approaches based on direct isolation and analysis of genetic material, proteins, and lipids from ecological samples have been discovered and shown the structural and functional information about microbial groups. Novel molecular tactics such as genetic fingerprinting, metagenomics, metaproteomics, metatranscriptomics, and proteogenomics are imperative and essential for determining and describing the huge microbial variety along with understanding of their synergistic behavior with biotic and abiotic ecological factors. This chapter recapitulates the latest development in molecular microbial ecology area paying attention to new methods and tactics that suggest novel understandings into phylogenetic, practical, and functional assortment of microbial assemblages. The benefits and drawbacks of normally employed molecular techniques to investigate microbial structures are also discussed along with probable applications of novel molecular approaches and how they can provide a outlook on developing technologies for environmental microbial community profiling.
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Acknowledgment
Ajit Varma is thankful to Department of Science and Technology and Department of Biotechnology for partial financial funding and to DST-FIST for providing confocal microscope facility.
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Kumar, M. et al. (2017). Omics: Tools for Assessing Environmental Microbial Diversity and Composition. In: Varma, A., Sharma, A. (eds) Modern Tools and Techniques to Understand Microbes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49197-4_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49197-4_18
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