Abstract
Biosphere is a store house of various microorganisms that may be employed to isolate and exploit microbes for environmental, pharmaceutical, agricultural and industrial applications. There is restricted data regarding the structure and dynamics of microbial communities in several ecosystems because only a little fraction of microbial diversity is accessible by culture methods. Owing to limitations of traditional enrichment methods and pure culture techniques, microbiological studies have offered a narrow portal for investigating microbial flora. The bacterial community represented by the morphological and nutritional criteria failed to provide a natural taxonomic order according to the evolutionary relationship. Genetic diversity among the isolates recovered from mushroom compost has not been widely studied. To understand genetic diversity and community composition of the mushroom compost microflora, different approaches are now followed by taxonomists, to characterize and identify isolates up to species level. Molecular microbial ecology is an emerging discipline of biology under molecular approach which can provide complex community profiles along with useful phylogenetic information. The genomic era has resulted in the development of new molecular tools and techniques for study of culturable microbial diversity including the DNA base ratio (mole% G + C), DNA-DNA hybridization, DNA microarray and reverse sample genome probing. In addition, non-culturable diversity of mushroom compost ecosystem can be characterized by employing various molecular tools which would be discussed in the present review.