Review Article Metagenomics: Retrospect and Prospects in High Throughput Age

Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In recent years, metagenomics has emerged as a powerful tool for mining of hidden microbial treasure in a culture independent manner. In the last twodecades,metagenomics has been applied extensively to exploit concealed potential ofmicrobial communities from almost all sorts of habitats. A brief historic progress made over the period is discussed in terms of origin of metagenomics to its current state and also the discovery of novel biological functions of commercial importance from metagenomes of diverse habitats. The present review also highlights the paradigm shift of metagenomics from basic study of community composition to insight into the microbial community dynamics for harnessing the full potential of uncultured microbes with more emphasis on the implication of breakthrough developments, namely, Next Generation Sequencing, advanced bioinformatics tools, and systems biology. 1