ABSTRACT
Environmental pollution is of serious ecotoxicological and health concern. Environmental pollutants, i.e., organic and inorganic pollutants are reported to soil/water pollution and severe health hazards in living beings, and thus, their amelioration is an urgent need to protect the human health and environment. Presently, microbes are viewed as the most potential ecofriendly tools to degrade and detoxify these highly toxic and hazardous chemicals from natural environment. Bioremediation is an emerging era of current research in field of environmental management and uses a variety of microbes to reinstate the contaminated sites. However, a strategic execution of the bioremediation requires the knowledge of metabolism, key enzyme involved, nature of microbial community, dynamics, and composition. This can be easily understood by applying molecular techniques. A variety of culture-dependent or conventional molecular techniques are currently being applied to characterize the potential degraders, but these techniques are sometimes biased and do not provide the accurate information. However, the currently emerging metagenomic approaches can provide the reliable information. Metagenomics is the environmental genomics that reveal very useful information about the metagenomes of environmental microorganisms using various culture-independent molecular techniques, which play an important role in the biogeochemical cycles and degradation and detoxification of environmental pollutants. Thus, this chapter provides an overview on the metagenomic approaches, workflow, and applications in microbial ecology and bioremediation.
