Metaproteomics: an emerging tool for the identifcation of proteins from extreme environments

Abstract

Microbial communities from extreme environments, such as saline, arid, hot, cold, acidic, or alkaline are especially important because they have special genetic and physiological modifcations to function properly under extreme environments. They possess extremozymes and other biomolecules that can be used in various industrial processes, e.g., pharmaceuticals, paper manufacturing, degradation of complex organic molecules, biofuel production and food industries. With the advent of new sequencing technologies and ‘omics’ approaches, such as metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics, new windows have been opened to study the microbial ecology and functional microbial communities from extreme environments. Recently, metaproteomic analysis has been extensively used to explore the functional microbial communities from various extreme environments around the globe. In this review, we have focused on the microbial diversity analysis, identifcation of novel proteins, and enzymes from extreme environments, through metaproteomic approaches.