Potential Application of Microbial Resources in North East India: Future Prospects and Challenges

The North-eastern region in India is one of the most important biodiversity hot spots of the world. The microbial resources of this area have tremendous potentiality for sustainable human development and livelihood management though the conventional microbiological approaches of isolating and identifying microbes of this area have been consolidated with little advent of molecular biotechnology and bioinformatics. Therefore, the present review has been designed to discuss the immense potentiality of these economically important microbial resources of North-East India along with their significance in international level. Molecular phylogenetic analysis and development of appropriate macromolecular markers are considered as important key in this approach regarding maximum exploration of this microbial gene pool. The present paper also focuses on the application of bioinformatics as an important tool in microbial research, particularly, in the prediction of 3D structure and analysis of sequence variation of important microbial proteins for probable characterization of functional and evolutionary properties of these significant natural resources.