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Abstract
Soils sustain an immense diversity of microbes, which, to a large extent, remains
unexplored. A range of novel methods, most of which are based on rRNA and rDNA analyses,
have uncovered part of the soil microbial diversity. The next step in the era of microbial
ecology is to extract genomic, evolutionary and functional information from bacterial
artificial chromosome libraries of the soil community genomes (the metagenome). Sophisticated
analyses that apply molecular phylogenetics, DNA microarrays, functional genomics
and in situ activity measurements will provide huge amounts of new data, potentially
increasing our understanding of the structure and function of soil microbial ecosystems,
and the interactions that occur within them. This review summarizes the recent progress
in studies of soil microbial communities with focus on novel methods and approaches
that provide new insight into the relationship between phylogenetic and functional
diversity.