Environmental genomics : exploring the unmined richness of microbes to degrade xenobiotics

摘要: Increasing pollution of water and soils by xenobiotic compounds has led in the last few decades to an acute need for understanding impact toxic on microbial populations, catabolic degradation pathways xenobiotics set-up improvement bioremediation processes. Recent advances molecular techniques, including high-throughput approaches such as microarrays metagenomics, have opened up new perspectives pointed towards opportunities abatement environmental management. Compared with traditional techniques dependent isolation pure cultures laboratory, metagenomics allow specific questions be answered exploring using phenomenal resources uncultivable uncharacterized micro-organisms. This paper reviews current potential investigate genetic diversity environmentally relevant micro-organisms identify functional genes involved catabolism xenobiotics.