Bioinformatics Tools for Microbial Diversity Analysis

With several microbes discovered and rediscovered, there is a growing need to understand their lineage, origin, and occurrence. Given the microbial diversity and its importance in global impact, it would be interesting to explore the microbial resources to better disseminate the phenotyping, epidemiological investigations, screening, and metagenomics. There are several bioinformatics tools to mention from phylogenetic taxa, sequence and structural relationship, evolutionary mechanisms, horizontal gene transfer, and importantly functional genomics. Here we bring an overview of genomic tools that have aided identifying isolates, species, and subspecies of uncultured microorganisms and inferring their functional roles. While giving a gist of tools, we also discuss the features and limitations of these tools in the light of the emergence of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies.