Metagenomics is the technique, or set of techniques, whose main objective is to determine the microbial population that can be found in a determined environment, studied in the context of its community. For this, it uses the techniques of massive sequencing, or next generation sequencing, due to the difficulties presented by traditional techniques when trying to transfer all the microorganisms present in a given environment to the laboratory. Metagenomics is a newly created technique, which was born at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and since then the interest of the world scientific community in fields as diverse as medicine, biotechnology, agriculture or genetics has not left to grow. In this article, the authors make a historical review of the metagenomics, analyze and evaluate the different massive sequencing platforms used for metagenomic assays, review the current literature on this subject and advance future problems with which researchers who decide to go deeper in this field could find. In this way, the prior knowledge of the researcher will facilitate the approach of his research.
Keywords: 16S rRNA; Functional genomic; Massive sequencing; Metagenomics; Phylogeny.