**7. Conclusion**

The advent of 'culture independent' approaches for characterization of microbial diversity and their dynamics has been the single most significant development in the field of microbiology in general and microbial ecology, microbial biotechnology in particular. It has also greatly accelerated the research pertaining to extremophilic microbial diversity. With use of present 'state of the art' technologies viz., metagenomics and single cell genomics, a number of vital discoveries have been made that would not have been possible without the use of these technologies. Thus, it could be proposed that although, considerable progress has been made, yet there is a lot of scope for better application of metagenomics and single-cell genomics approaches to not only access genomes for discovering novel taxonomic lineages of extremophilic microorganisms but also harness their genetic and metabolic potential towards discovery of novel high value metabolites.

As an eventual future objective, the application of metagenomics and single cell genomics would be expected to complement the traditional cultivation approaches

**75**

**Author details**

Deepika Goyal1†, Shiv Swaroop2† and Janmejay Pandey1

\*Address all correspondence to: janmejay@curaj.ac.in

† Both the authors contributed equally.

provided the original work is properly cited.

1 Department of Biotechnology, School of Life Sciences, C.U. Rajasthan, India

2 Department of Biochemistry, School of Life Sciences, C.U. Rajasthan, India

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

\*

*Harnessing the Genetic Diversity and Metabolic Potential of Extremophilic Microorganisms…*

and follow suit with 'genomics guided –microbial culturing' towards' establishment of knowledge of the metabolic interactions circuits within mesophilic environments and more specifically within the extremophilic environments. Exploration of cultivation- independent approaches promise an exciting future for assessment and

Authors declare 'no conflict of interest' with respect to publication of this book

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.82639*

**Conflict of interest**

chapter.

exploitation of extremophilic microbial diversity.

*Harnessing the Genetic Diversity and Metabolic Potential of Extremophilic Microorganisms… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.82639*

and follow suit with 'genomics guided –microbial culturing' towards' establishment of knowledge of the metabolic interactions circuits within mesophilic environments and more specifically within the extremophilic environments. Exploration of cultivation- independent approaches promise an exciting future for assessment and exploitation of extremophilic microbial diversity.
