2. Meta-omics techniques: principles, methodologies and applications

Since the 1980s, the analysis of soil microbial communities has seen the emergence of a new paradigm (figure 5 ). Pasteurian analyses, based on the characterization of pure strains grown in the laboratory, have given way to approaches based on the characterization of biological material, notably DNA, but also other biological sources such as RNA, proteins or metabolites. This material is now extracted directly from an environmental sample, making it possible to move on from the study of an isolated micro-organism to the analysis of microbial communities in their natural environment, known as "meta-omics" (figure