Chapter 5: Application of Metagenomics in Environmental Anaerobic Technology

Anaerobic technology has been applied for the treatment of solid wastes and wastewater since the 1880s. This chapter reviews the most recent advance in molecular microbial characterization techniques, i.e., metagenomics, as well as its applications in anaerobic technology, from the exploration of the intriguing science of anaerobes to industrial engineering applications. With the rapidly decreasing cost of high-throughput sequencing technologies and timely updating of state-of-the-art bioinformatics analysis tools, metagenomics has revolutionized the study of microbiology and demonstrated the great potential of the development of novel microbial resources (e.g., industrial biomolecules and enzymes and biodegradation genes), as it discloses unprecedented genetic information of uncultivated microorganisms at an amazingly fast rate. This chapter gives a detailed introduction to the technical procedures of metagenomics, from preliminary molecular experiments to high-throughput sequencing, as well as its application in environmental anaerobic technology.