METAGENOMIC ANALYSIS OF MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES FOR BIOREMEDIATION OF CONTAMINATED ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

With the advent of fast industrialization, the extensive agricultural use of cultured land and urban growth, environmental pollution has become the top priority worldwide, and it is extremely dangerous to the ecological state and human health. Traditional remediation solutions, such as physical and chemical processes, tend to be costly, consume a lot of energy, and can also produce secondary pollutants, which is why more acceptable and environmentally-friendly solutions are required. Microbial bioremediation has become one of the highly effective methods that leverage the metabolic diversity within microorganisms to turn, degrade, or immobilise a broad variety of environmental pollutants. More recently in metagenomics, improvement in this area has come in with the ability to study microbial communities at a comprehensive, culture-independent level that can give a deeper insight on the cornerstone of metabolic capability, functional genes, and taxonomic diversity of microbial communities. This review summarises the recent advances of metagenomic technologies, and their role in determining the key genes and enzymatic pathways that are used in the hydrocarbon, heavy metal, and other toxic compounds degradation. It also emphasises the significance of higher-level bioinformatics tools with regard to both the sequence analysis and the functional annotation as well as pathway reconstruction. Though this has made significant advances, issues including incomplete assembly of genome, constraints of full experimental validation and a large level of computation remain. The field of the future research needs to be integrating multi-omics approach and artificial intelligence-based analytics to improve the accuracy, scalability, and effectiveness of bioremediation systems based on metagenomics.