DOI: 10.36347/sjavs.2020.v07i06.003

Pages: 125-132

Most of soil microbes have not yet been individuated and their metabolisms are unknown. Recent studies indicate that classic plate counting techniques were able to determine only a part of the overall soil microbial community and that the metagenomics approach, based on a culture independent method, allows to study it in depth and to overcome the previous limits. The relevance of this approach is growing as it allows exploring factors affecting the soil fertility, to deepen the interactions between microorganisms and plants, and to identify new molecules with pharmacological activities such as antibiotics. This work investigates the metagenomics approach and the most commonly used sequencing methods, focusing on bioinformatics tools for each of them. Some of the most recent metagenomics soil applications, concerning both amplicon and whole genome shotgun sequencing are described. Therefore, metagenomics, used in combination with other omics approaches, based on metabolomics, transcriptomics and/or proteomics, is discussed and focused as it can provide a comprehensive soil microbiome draw.