Meta-omics approaches for understanding and exploring soil microbial communities for sustainable agriculture

The global population is projected to rise to about 10 billion by the year 2050, hiking the demand for food and energy resources. Moreover, climate change and land degradation are continuously intimidating food security and agriculture sustainability. Soil health maintenance is one of the factors to sustain agroecosystem productivity. Soil microbiota, as a biological component, influences soil properties and health greatly. Along with different hosts and environments, microorganisms interact intimately with one another shaping an interconnecting complex system or community. In the recent past, meta-omics approaches have increased our understanding of soil microbial communities considerably. Meta-omics approaches, namely meta-genomics, meta-transcriptomics, meta-proteomics, and stable isotope probing–omics, offer enormous potential for understanding uncultivated microbial diversity. Overall, meta-omics approaches are utilized to explore microbial community structure, potential, function, activity, and interactions, community shift to climate changes. This chapter is presenting an overview of meta-omics approaches to study microbial communities for sustainable agriculture.