ABSTRACT
Food being an excellent source of nutrients, serves as a favorite habitat for microorganisms. These microorganisms can be either beneficial or detrimental. They can bring about the spoilage of food or help in fermentation. Hence, in-depth study of the microbial ecology of food is necessary. This can be achieved by high-throughput and cost-effective next-generation sequencing (NGS) methods which can sequence the microbial nucleic acid isolated directly from the given food sample. These are culture-independent and hence even have the advantages of studying organisms which are otherwise undetectable using traditional culture-based methods. In this chapter, short descriptions of currently used NGS technologies are provided. Also discussed is how these techniques can be used to examine the microbial diversity of food. Applications and future perspectives of these high-throughput sequencing techniques in studying food microbiology are also presented.
