Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics in India: Explorations and Perspectives

The discipline of genomics and metagenomics has been rapidly growing as an emerging field of research since the last decade.This development is largely due to the rapid advances in sequencing technologies that generate enormous amount of highthroughput data at low costs. While there is huge information on genomics and metagenomics from different parts of theworld, there have been few studies from India due to the underlying limitation of data analyses. In this review, majorgenomic and metagenomic studies to predict the bacterial diversity and their ecological significance, and the functional rolesplayed by microbes in different environments in India have been summarized. The integration of culture dependent andculture-independent approaches has expanded our knowledge on the composition and function of microbial communitiesin specific niches. However, there still exist challenges and gaps in our understanding about the microbial resource in Indiansubcontinent as their importance is over-looked by the scientific community despite quite a few reports on metagenomics/genomics from India.