45 microbial cultures have been isolated from a chemically polluted region, using dimethylterephthalate (DMT) as a sole carbon and energy source. They have been subjected to adaptive selection in order to increase their biodegradative potential. The gradual increase of the xenobiotic substrate concentration from 2.5 to 25 mM induced adaptive changes in the tested strains. 20% of the studied str...

This is the first report on the microbial diversity of xaj-pitha, a rice wine fermentation starter culture through a metagenomics approach involving Illumine-based whole genome shotgun (WGS) sequencing method. Metagenomic DNA was extracted from rice wine starter culture concocted by Ahom community of Assam and analyzed using a MiSeq® System. A total of 2,78,231 contigs, with an average read len...

The soil-plant ecosystem harbors an immense microbial diversity that challenges investigative approaches to study traits underlying plant-microbe association. Studies solely based on culture-dependent techniques have overlooked most microbial diversity. Here we describe the concomitant use of culture-dependent and -independent techniques to target plant-beneficial microbial groups from the suga...

I. Ahmad et al. (eds.), Microbes and Microbial Technology: Agricultural and Environmental Applications, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7931-5_2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Culture-based methods are important in investigating the microbial ecology of natural and anthropogenically impacted environments, but they are extremely biased in their evaluation of microbial genetic diver...

Metagenomics seeks to characterize the composition of microbial communities, their operations, and their dynamically coevolving relationships with the habitats they occupy without having to culture community members. Uniting metagenomics with analyses of the products of microbial community metabolism (metabolomics) will shed light on how microbial communities function in a variety of environmen...