ABSTRACT
Microbial contaminants can be defined as the noxious microbes that are present in the sample to be analyzed. The contaminants are introduced into the sample starting from the collection of the samples via the innumerable complex course involved like sample processing, preparation of ribonucleic acid (RNA), deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) library preparation, and finally until nucleic acid data analysis. The novel technique for the detection of these contaminants is next-generation sequencing (NGS), which is a collection of sophisticated technologies that establish accurate sequence of nucleotides in DNA moieties. The NGS is the second-generation sequencing where both culturable and non-culturable microbes can be detected in one go. Contrary to the first-generation sequencing, the NGS technology is specified by being highly adaptable, letting the entire genome to be sequenced at once. It proves to be an extremely sensitive technique, which is comparatively unprejudiced and can be utilized in the universal evaluation of different contaminants. In this chapter, an effort has been made to encapsulate the various NGS methods for the evaluation and characterization of the microbial contaminants in the different research as well as biological areas their limitations and discussion on the various applications of NGS in the detection of microbial contaminants.
