METAGENOMIC ANALYSIS OF YUMTHANG HOT SPRING SIKKIM INDIA

The high temperature ecosystems such as hot springs are important to study as the adaptation to these punitive habitats explains the high genomic and metabolic flexibility of microbial communities in these ecosystems and makes thermophiles and their thermostable proteins very suitable for some industrial and biotechnological applications. Therefore, screening for novel biocatalysts from thermophiles has become a very important field. In the last few years, novel thermostable polymerases, beta-galactosidases, esterases, and xylanases, among others, have been described and characterized, opening a new horizon in biotechnology. Moreover, the study of thermophiles delivers a better understanding about the origin and evolution of earliest life, as they are considered to be phenotypically most similar to microorganisms present on the primitive Earth. As the metagenomic approach is based on the total environmental DNA extraction which involves the DNA of both live and dead cells thus there is a kind of ambiguity in the results also the other important drawback of this approach is that high quality whole community DNA is needed, which makes the extraction a critical step in the process of generating metagenomic data