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With the advent of the genomics era powered by DNA sequencing technologies, life science is being transformed significantly and biological research and development have been accelerated. Environmental biology concerns the relationships among living organisms and their natural environment, which constitute the global biogeochemical cycle. As sustainability of the ecosystems depends on biodiversity, examining the structure and dynamics of the biotic constituents and fully grasping their genetic and metabolic capabilities are pivotal. The high-speed highthroughput next-generation sequencing can be applied to barcoding organisms either thriving or endangered and to decoding the whole genome information. Furthermore, diversity and the full gene complement of a microbial community can be elucidated and monitored through metagenomic approaches. With regard to human welfare, microbiomes of various human habitats such as gut, skin, mouth, stomach, and vagina, have been and are being scrutinized. To keep pace with the rapid increase of the sequencing capacity, various bioinformatic algorithms and software tools that even utilize supercomputers and cloud computing are being developed for processing and storage of massive data sets. Environmental genomics will be the major force in understanding the structure and function of ecosystems in nature as well as preserving, remediating, and bioprospecting them.
