ABSTRACT
Microbial ecology is the study of interactions between microbes and their biotic and abiotic environments. The responses of microbes to their environment and the impacts they have upon it are encoded in the genomes of individuals. For this simple reason the young, yet established, field of microbial ecology and the rapidly expanding field of genomics are entwined. This chapter considers what genomics has offered microbial ecology to date and what it might offer in the future.
