Exploring the bacterial community composition of soil from a tropical dry evergreen forest in Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract Metagenomics is a cutting edge omics technology that has been employed in various fields including novel product discovery, diagnostics, and pollutant monitoring. 16S metagenome amplicon sequencing is used for understanding the microbial diversity from various environments. Forest ecosystems have been known for the discovery of novel bacteria and also bacteria that produces novel compounds that are pharmaceutically and industrially relevant. In this study we try to show the bacterial community structure of the soil obtained from a tropical evergreen forest in India. We use 16s metagenomics sequencing and then follow it up with various analysis like alpha diversity analysis, to find out the dominant bacterial species found in these soils. Actinobacteria was found to be the most copmmonly found bacterial phylum followed by proteobacteria, firmicutes, chloroflexi, acidobacteria, verrucomicrobia, bacteroidetes, gemmatimonadetes, nitospirae and other unclassified organisms. Further studies can elucidate on the discovery of novel compounds from these bacteria.