To discover and characterize microbial members within their community and their roles in the environment, high-throughput omics approaches are being developed and applied. Among them, sequencing- and microarray-based metagenomics is the most mature key approach, providing information basis for most other omics technologies. Metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics and community metabolomics have had limited successes but already shown promising potentials. All of the omics approaches lie on the support of bioinformatics, which becomes a major bottleneck in omics applications. These new omics technologies are revolutionizing the field of environmental microbiology in revealing the genetic potentials and functional activities of microbial communities.
