Advancement of omics: Future prospects for bioremediation of contaminated soils

Abstract

The soil being the most heterogeneous substance hosts the dynamic environments for diverse micro-organisms. Traditional techniques are limited to explore only few portion of massive unknown soil microbial world due to their well-known biasness in detecting microbial genetic and functional diversity. With this respect, Omics targets the powerful genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics tools to explore the vast microbial community, new biomolecules, novel pathways to better understand toxicity mechanisms, predict the risks associated with environmental toxicity and bio-prospecting of value added products. These new approaches will be useful to establish the linkage between structure and function of soil microbial community to get better insight in ecological processes in the environment with special emphasis on plant-microbe ecosystems. Application of genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics provides better understanding of the catabolic reactions of organic and inorganic compounds. The vision about the different -omic tools that provide information in the microbes involved in soil bioremediation and their metabolic reactions. The present review will give an overview of the application of the advanced molecular tools as well as their potentials and limitations in studying the soil microbial ecology for their potential application in bioremediation.